W5: language in use, punctuation and capital letters

Question 1

What do we use to make inferences in conversation on what people really mean?

Answer 1

What someone says
How they say it
What they do not say

Question 2

Everytime we speak we perform a.. and why

Answer 2

Speech act, to reach a goal

Question 3

What are Austin’s three forces (speech acts)?

Answer 3

Locutionary force: Literal meaning (‘would you mind not speaking up the back’)

Illocutionary force: Trying to achieve (trying to say ‘stop talking’)

Perlocutionary force: Effect utterance has on the listener (the listener stops talking)

Question 4

What are Searle’s five types of speech acts?

Answer 4

Representatives: Asserting a fact, conveying full belief in its truth (‘this door is hard to open’)

Directives: trying to get the listener to do something (‘can you make it any easier’)

Commissives: committing to some future action (‘I will email them about the door’)

Expressives: revealing psychological state (‘it makes me nervous that its hard to get out’)

Declaratives: Bringing about a new state of affairs (‘I have found a new way to open the door’)

Question 5

Explain direct and indirect speech acts

Answer 5

Direct speech acts: straightforward utterances (intentions revealed in words)

Indirect speech acts: require interpretation by the listener

Question 6

Indirect speech acts become more indirect with increasing..

Answer 6

politeness

Question 7

What is discourse analysis?

Answer 7

Linguists use this - tries to discover basic units of discourse and rules

Question 8

Give an example of a discourse convention

Answer 8

‘Did joe like the shirt Lucy wore last night?’
- do not have to say ‘Yes joe liked the shirt lucy wore last night’. you can say ‘yes he liked it’
You can use these pronouns to stand for previous info in the conversation

Question 9

Cohesion in discourse allows us to use various terms to refer to ideas we have already mentioned - give examples of this

Answer 9

Pronouns: I like Sally. She is great (do not have to name her again)
Substitution: He asked her to sing. She did so.
Ellipsis: Do you want to go out dancing tonight? I don’t…
Lexical: Brody went speeding in his car again last night. That crazy fool will get himself hurt.

Question 10

Explain discourse and the use of ‘a’ and ‘the’

Answer 10

The: means the referent is agreed on by both the speaker and the listener (I saw the sign - both know what youre on about)

A: Listener does not know the referent (I saw a sign - other doesnt know which sign you mean)

Hard for children to learn, autistic children struggle

Question 11

What behaviours are involved in turn taking?

Answer 11

Gaze 
Hand gestures (e.g. putting hand up to stop someone from talking) 
Filled pauses (mmm instead of silence) 
Intonational contour of utterance 
Semantic and syntactic structure

Question 12

Explain how conversation/dialogue is collaborative

Answer 12

Audience design: Speakers collaborate with listeners to ensure that utterances are understood

Alignment: Trying to make conversation match for both listener and speaker (should make sense to both)

Ambiguity reduction: speakers monitor speech and nearly always avoid non-linguistic ambiguity (looking for signs of not understanding eg. puzzled look)

Question 13

What are Grice’s conversational maxims?

Answer 13

They are unwritten rules for efficient speech

Maxim of:
Quality (do not lie, tell the truth and acknowledge uncertainty)
Manner (be brief and orderly. avoid ambiguity and obscurity)
Quantity (say no more and no less than the discourse requires)
Relevance (confine yourself to only what is relevant)

Question 14

What is politeness?

Answer 14

Acting so as to take account of the feelings of others

Question 15

What are the two types of politeness?

Answer 15

Positive face: when you want someone to approve of you

Negative face: you do not want to be stopped doing what you want

Question 16

What else governs how polite you are to others?

Answer 16

• Power: more polite to those who are more powerful than you
• Social distance: more polite with people you don’t know well
• Degree of imposition involved (e.g. how big of an ask something is)

Question 17

What are some examples of positive politeness?

Answer 17

Notice/attend to your hearer (saying something to show you’ve attended) - ‘oh you’ve had your ears pierced!’

Exaggerate interest/approval/sympathy (polite to look like you care)

Avoid disagreement (being polite instead of having a strong opinion and getting involved)

Joke (show friendliness)

Question 18

What are some examples of negative politeness?

Answer 18

Be pessimistic (we do it to show respect in some cases) - ‘I dont suppose you remember me’

Minimise imposition (showing you don’t want to be annoying) - ‘can i ask you a quick question’

Impersonalise speaker and hearer

Apologise (being polite when others do the wrong thing)
- ‘i’m sorry but do you mind not talking up there?’

Question 19

How does politeness cause violations of Grice’s maxims?

Answer 19

Politeness can be wordy, and thus violate Grice’s maxims

Question 20

How do children learn to be polite?

Answer 20

Parents socialise children into politeness routines

Question 21

What are two forms of ‘silent spelling’?

Answer 21

Punctuation and capitalisation

Question 22

Why was the initial greek punctuation system created and what did it mean?

Answer 22

The main reason for writing was to use for oral presentations so the punctuation represented various pauses of different lengths
Comma = short pause
Colon = a longer pause
Periodus = longer pause again

Useful because in early writing there were no spaces

Question 23

The addition of spaces has…

Answer 23

Made reading much more accessible and less confusing

Question 24

What has happened to the full stop?

Answer 24

Was originally used to seperate words - now we use it to show the end of the sentence.

Has always been neutral but now in text messaging, zero punctuation is the new neutral - full stops make younger people assume people are annoyed or being abrupt

Question 25

What is the most often used punctuation mark?

Answer 25

The comma as you can have many per sentence

Question 26

Explain the use of exclamation marks in digital communication

Answer 26

Would be assumes to be used to express emotion but actually used more to show support

They are used more by women than men - men use more when angry and women use them to show the above mentioned support

Question 27

What is interesting about the use of question marks in digital communication?

Answer 27

Digital communication usually encourages ‘punctuation minimalism’ but the opposite is true for question marks with them being used more digitally than they are in writing

Question 28

What are hypens used for?

Answer 28

Used to be used for end-of-line word breaks but not so much anymore with word processing etc

They are used to join compound words. E.g. Four-year-old children (if not in the right places, you actually chnage the meaning)

Question 29

Explain some studies on punctuation use

Answer 29

Connors & Lunsford

• Marked 3000 undergrad writing samples for errors
• top 20 error categories, 8 of which involved punctuation

Lunsford & Lunsford

• marked 877 papers
• again 7 of the top 20 error types involved punctuation (mostly commas)

Question 30

Explain some studies that demonstrate the punctuation use is related to writing ability

Answer 30

Taylor & Nightingale

• compared top and bottom thirds in terms of writing errors
• punctuation errors were the best discriminators

Bourke & Holbrook

• Compared good and poor writers
• use of commas one of two major error types that distinguished both groups

Question 31

When do we use capitals?

Answer 31

At the start of the sentence

For proper nouns

Question 32

What else can capitals be used to do?

Answer 32

Emphasise things in writing

Question 33

When do we learn capitals?

Answer 33

The Australian Curriculum specifies teaching in prep, G1, G2 but not beyond suggesting we should be able to use them correctly by grade 2

Question 34

How do children learn capitals?

Answer 34

Children start with mostly uppercase letters especially for name-initial letter (becuase they have seen that capital so much)

They then start to use lowercase letters too, and reserve capitals for their correct places eventually once they figure out which of their two mental representations for the same letter should be used when

(Treiman & Kessler, 2014)

Question 35

What is statistical learning?

Answer 35

Learning from your environment without explicitly being taught - evidence builds up

Question 36

Geoghagen and Fitzgerald? (capitals)

Answer 36

Looked at letters children (grade 5) had written to people and their grammatical errors
5% in all errors were getting sentence initial capitals wrong - a further 3% of errors were when they didn’t use them when they should for proper nouns

Question 37

Odom (capitals)

Answer 37

Dictated words to children (grade 4-6) that test capital letter use

• Sentence initial caps: 57% correct
• Proper noun caps: 63% correct overall

Question 38

Explain some studies looking at adults capital letter use

Answer 38

Lunsford and Lunsford

• assessed 877 undergrad writing samples
• capitalisation errors = 5.2% of total errors

Wilcox et al.

• 149 essays from grade 10 and 12 students
• capitalisation errors = 8% of total errors

Evans

• ceiling effects for correctly using caps for proper nouns (99%)
• But sometimes incorrectly used caps for common nouns (89% correct)

Question 39

Explain the integration of multiple patterns theory

Answer 39

Implicit and explicit learning

We make decisions about the outer form of writing (visual) and the inner and sound based writing

We integrate all of this as we are writing to make decisions

THE MORE CUES TOWARDS A PARTICULAR SPELLING, THE MORE LIKELY WE ARE TO USE IT