W5: language in use, punctuation and capital letters Flashcards
What do we use to make inferences in conversation on what people really mean?
What someone says
How they say it
What they do not say
Everytime we speak we perform a.. and why
Speech act, to reach a goal
What are Austin’s three forces (speech acts)?
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)
What are Searle’s five types of speech acts?
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’)
Explain direct and indirect speech acts
Direct speech acts: straightforward utterances (intentions revealed in words)
Indirect speech acts: require interpretation by the listener
Indirect speech acts become more indirect with increasing..
politeness
What is discourse analysis?
Linguists use this - tries to discover basic units of discourse and rules
Give an example of a discourse convention
‘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
Cohesion in discourse allows us to use various terms to refer to ideas we have already mentioned - give examples of this
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.
Explain discourse and the use of ‘a’ and ‘the’
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
What behaviours are involved in turn taking?
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
Explain how conversation/dialogue is collaborative
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)
What are Grice’s conversational maxims?
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)
What is politeness?
Acting so as to take account of the feelings of others
What are the two types of politeness?
Positive face: when you want someone to approve of you
Negative face: you do not want to be stopped doing what you want
What else governs how polite you are to others?
- 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)
What are some examples of positive politeness?
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)
What are some examples of negative politeness?
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?’
How does politeness cause violations of Grice’s maxims?
Politeness can be wordy, and thus violate Grice’s maxims
How do children learn to be polite?
Parents socialise children into politeness routines
What are two forms of ‘silent spelling’?
Punctuation and capitalisation
Why was the initial greek punctuation system created and what did it mean?
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
The addition of spaces has…
Made reading much more accessible and less confusing
What has happened to the full stop?
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
What is the most often used punctuation mark?
The comma as you can have many per sentence
Explain the use of exclamation marks in digital communication
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
What is interesting about the use of question marks in digital communication?
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
What are hypens used for?
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)
Explain some studies on punctuation use
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)
Explain some studies that demonstrate the punctuation use is related to writing ability
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
When do we use capitals?
At the start of the sentence
For proper nouns
What else can capitals be used to do?
Emphasise things in writing
When do we learn capitals?
The Australian Curriculum specifies teaching in prep, G1, G2 but not beyond suggesting we should be able to use them correctly by grade 2
How do children learn capitals?
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)
What is statistical learning?
Learning from your environment without explicitly being taught - evidence builds up
Geoghagen and Fitzgerald? (capitals)
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
Odom (capitals)
Dictated words to children (grade 4-6) that test capital letter use
- Sentence initial caps: 57% correct
- Proper noun caps: 63% correct overall
Explain some studies looking at adults capital letter use
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)
Explain the integration of multiple patterns theory
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
