midterm Flashcards
First-language education
When a child studies their home language or languages
Second-language education
When someone studies their society’s majority or official language which is not their home language
Foreign-language education
When someone studies the language of another country
Language testing
The assessment and evaluation of language achievement and proficiency, both in first and additional languages, and for both general and specific purposes
Clinical linguistics
The study and treatment of speech and communication impairments, whether hereditary, developmental, or acquired (through injury, stroke, illness, or age)
Workplace communication
The study of how language is used in the workplace, and how it contributes to the nature and power relations of different types of work
Language planning
The making of decisions, often supported by legislation, about the official status of languages and their institutional use, including their use in education
Forensic linguistics
The deployment of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal investigations, for example, to establish the authorship of a document, or a profile of a speaker from a tape-recording
Literary stylistics
The study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in literature
Critical discourse analysis
The study of the relationship between linguistic choices and effects in persuasive uses of language, of how these indoctrinate of manipulate (for example, in marketing or politics), and the counteracting of this through analysis
Translation and interpretation
The formulation of principles underlying the perceived equivalence between a stretch of language and its translation, and the practices of translating written text and interpreting spoken language
Information design
The arrangement and presentation of written language, including issues relating to typography and layout, choices of medium, and effective combinations of language with other means of communication such as pictures and diagrams
Lexicography
The planning and compiling of both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, and other language reference works such as thesauri
sociolinguistics
Is the study of language variation and language change.
standardization
is a process that is apparent in almost all modern nations, in which one variety of a particular language is taken up (by government, the education system, newspapers and other media) and promoted as the ‘standard’ form.
codification
is a prominent feature of standard forms: grammar books and dictionaries are written promoting the form; texts of religious or cultural significance and canonical literature in the form are valued; and the variety is taught to children in schools.
speech community
which might correspond with the group as defined by other non-linguistic means: nationality, age range, gender, town or city population, political allegiance and so on.
linguistic variable
operating at a grammar level, for example, variations in the morphology of subject-verb agreement.
diglossia
Where there is a functional division between the languages’ usage, for example when one is used for formal or printed contexts and the other just in speech
genderlect
The notion of a it has been proposed to account for some of the apparently systematic differences in the ways men and women use language.
observer’s paradox
The concern that the interactants’ awareness of being observed and recorded for research purposes may actually affect their communicative behaviour and thus distort the primary research data.
accommodation
Most conversations have a ‘recipient design’, that is, speakers plan their utterances with the addressee in mind. This factor often results in speakers adjusting their accent, style or language towards their addressees.
idiolect-sociolect
Idiolect is one’s own characteristic in speaking, it’s individual, while sociolect is used by a social group.
dialect-accent
A dialect refers to the characteristic patterns of words and word-order which are used by a group of speakers while the accent is a pattern of pronanciation.
pidgin-creole
Pidgin languages are new languages based on two or more languages and these become the first languages of a new generation than they are called creoles.
hypercorrection-covert prestige
People of certain social groups aiming for a more prestigious form of language than they would naturally use. This is called ‘hypercorrection’. The counterpart of hypercorrection is the phenomenon observed when some people use stigmatized forms of language this is known as ‘covert prestige’.
dialect levelling model - gravity model of diffusion
A ‘dialect levelling model’ of change has been used to account for data in a number of studies. Large-scale homogenization appears to be taking place in spoken British English: differences between accents are becoming less marked. A ‘gravity model’ of ‘diffusion’, which involves the spreading of variants from an identifiable local base into other geographical localities, also appears to be underway. Many of the spreading features in British English are thought to be moving northwards from a south-eastern epicentre. Forms associated with London English are now found in urban centres far from the capital.
What aspects of language can be explored within sociolinguistics, i.e., what are the descriptive tools of language variation? Give one example for each category.
(a) The linguistic variable
e.g. This is any single feature of language which could be realized by different choices.
Farm some pronounce the /r/ some not and if they do there are also variations
(b) Phonological variation
e.g. . Phonological variables also have the advantage that they are usually below the level of conscious awareness, so the recorded data can be relied on to be naturalistic. (strong or broad accent)
(c) Grammatical variation
e.g. A major feature of African–American vernacular English (AAVE) is the non-use of the verb ‘to be’ in some contexts: he a big man, you the teacher. This is known as ‘zero copula’, and is the grammatical form to use when the verb could be contracted in general American English or standard British English: he’s a big man, you’re the teacher.
(d) Lexical variation
e.g. Most local areas have specific lexical items that serve to identify their speakers: your nose is a neb in Yorkshire; a square is to Philadelphians what a block is to a New Yorker
(e) Discoursal variation
e.g. how politicians can be trained to exploit techniques for ‘keeping their turn’ or how politeness (and impoliteness) works have been generalized cross-culturally
ELF
English as a lingua franca – concerned with the particularities of international communication where speakers with different linguacultural backgrounds interact
World Englishes
Refers to the English language as it is variously used throughout the world
Euro-English
Is a group of dialects of the English language used in Europe.
EIL
English as an international language,
English is used as a local means of intra-national communication in countries like the outer-circle and English has become the common global means of intra-national communication