A2 Language notes

• An adjacency pair could be a 'question and answer' or 'statement and response'
• The term for saying 'yeah' or 'uh huh' whilst someone else is talking is back-channel agreement.
• If conversation flows swiftly from one turn to the next, this is called latched talk.
• The observers paradox is when you affect the data you are studying by investigating it.
• The data from your investigation needs to be ethical, comparable and reliable.
• A03 awards marks for context.
• GRAPE-Genre, reception, audience, purpose, expectations.
• You should analyse texts for how they make meanings and representations
• Examples of terms from the framework 'lexis' - connotations, lexical field, metaphor etc.
• Deborah Tannen's theory was the difference theory.
• Examples of deficit features- empty adjectives, intensifiers, hedges, tag questions etc.
• Deborah Cameron- 'your genes don't determine your jeans'
• Trudgill did his NORMS research in Norwich
• The island locals in Martha's Vineyard show covert prestige.
• There was more pronunciation of the post-vocalic 'R' sound in more expensive stores in Labovs 'fourth floor' study
• Overgeneralisation is when children apply standard grammatical rules to irregular verbs and nouns
• The stage after the two-word stage is the telegraphic stage.
• The halliday's function for getting your needs met is the instrumental function
• Deb Roy did the research on his son and discovered that caregivers simplify the utterances around a word that is about to be learned.

 

 

Original writing ideas

Gender equality

• Equal pay - today women earn on average £140,000 less than men over their working careers. 
• Equal rights
• Mostly male leaders
• 
  

Michael Rosen - Word of mouth - How do children develop language?

• Intonation is key when helping babies to organise what they hear
• children use statistics to recognise where words start and end-syllables and frequency differences
• 0-12 months main language learning stage
• vocabulary comes later
• sensitive to patterns at early stages
• most words have strong-weak pattern
• learning process relies on feedback and hearing themselves speak
• babies play with sounds
• babies recognise language as soon as they are born
• 2nd birthday combining words
• emphasis and repetition

CLD - Child Language Development

How do we learn to speak?

• Parents and carers have a huge influence
• Imitation and reinforcement - copy and reproduce - nurture
• Interactions-using language with others/different contexts/playing
• Born with it/nature/innate/Fox-p-2
• A window for language development closes around early puberty

Stephen Fry-Planet Word-Origins of language

• Fox-p-2 = DNA code, enabling us to develop language from birth
• Deb Roy-Speech home project-tracked pronunciation of noun water over 7 months
• From the age of 2, children pick up 10 new words a day
• the child's semantic awareness outstrips their phonological ability(highlighted by Deb Roy)

Lexis

• HFL/LFL (High frequency lexis/low frequency lexis)
• Form-purpose-audience
• techniques of style model(quotes)

Grammar

• Punctuation-sentence structure-register
• spelling
• syntax(sentence)

Syntax functions

• interrogative
• exclamative
• declarative
• imperative

Horizon-Why do we talk?

• Children learn o speak with minimal effort
• despite decades of research, how we learn to talk remains a mystery
• parents simplify language to match child (convergence)
• As child's language develops, parents converge
• Doctor Cathy Price-work in progress-studies parts of brain
• Baby recognises mums voice first
• Innate ability for language
• Noam Chomsky-Language is innate-We all have L.A.D
• Jean Burko Gleason-we need to be exposed to language

Language acquisition

• Morphology is happening at a unconscious level
• sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing
• Babies see more than hear at first
• Non verbal is the main source of communication for kids
• Intonation- Sound of words
• Rhythm, stress certain words
• Lip reading
• At 18 months, learn 10 new words a day
• Deaf children acquire sign language the same way hearing children acquire spoken language
• if child develops language after puberty, they will never be able to fully acquire language
• child understands more words than they can speak
• at 18 months you have a productive vocabulary of about 50 words
• if you expose a baby to 2 languages they will learn both
• phatic talk with babies to help develop their language
• care givers initiate conversation with adjacency pairs
• pronouns can be determiners (you, me, it, here, there)

Michael Rosen Radio - Word Of Mouth

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtnz/episodes/player

Style Model

http://www.ok.co.uk/celebrity-news/600757/marnie-simpson-slams-lewis-bloor-celebrity-big-brother-showmance-claims

Paper 1 Terminology

Acronym - initials of other words
Adjacency Pairs - question/answer + greeting/response
Adverb - word added to a verb eg. quickly
Antonym - word with opposite meaning to another word
Assonance - repetition
Clipping -  word formed by shortening an existing word
Cohesion - way a test holds together through words, grammar and ideas
Collocation - way certain words appear together e.g. fish and chips
Colloquial language - informal vocabulary

Language and gender link

http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/gender.htm

Language and occupation theories

Discourse communities (John Swales)
A discourse community is a group of people that share similar goals, values and have different ways of communicating these. In addition to owning genres, it has acquired specific lexis that can be recognized by others. For instance chefs would say a number table that would only be understood by their co workers who are part of the same discourse community. Among their members discourse communities have specific mechanisms of communication. For example usually teachers would communicate via email as it would not be efficient sending letters, whereas it would be too informal to send a text message. To be part of a discourse community, it is essential to have some knowledge or expertise in that subject, therefore you are able to communicate and understand the different language that is used. 

Examples: 

• Farmers
• Teachers
• Sports fans/teams
• Video gamers
• Religious groups
• Sororities

Grice's Maxims

1. The maxim of quality - Be truthful
2. The maxim of quantity - As informative as required 
3. The maxim of relation - Be relevant
4. The maxim of manner - Be perspicacious

These maxims form the basis for inferences that we draw in a normal conversation. These maxims can be violated to give rise to new implications. Ways of violating a maxim are:

• opting out - to choose to not respond following the rules of the maxims.
• flouting a maxim (manner) - expects the other person to notice (sarcasm)

Goffman face theory

Everyone is subconsciously concerned with how other people perceive them. We strive socially to maintain our own identity for other people to see. Also he believes that we care about losing face as i diminishes our self-image.

Brown and Levinson: Politeness theory

Positive face is the desire to be liked, appreciated and approved by society.

Negative face is the desire to not be imposed upon, intruded, or otherwise put upon.

Lexis and semantics

Denotative meaning: literal meaning

Connotative meaning: associated meaning of words

Figurative language: language used in a non-literal way to describe something in a different way (similes and metaphors)

Semantic fields: groups of words connected by a shared subject or field. e.g. medicine, art, sport.

Phonetics and phonology

Phoneme: the basic unit of sound. 

Diphthong: a vowel sound that is the combination of two serperate sounds, where a speaker glides from one to another. e.g hear

International Phonetic Alphabet: An internationally recognized system of phonetic transcription.

Sound iconicity: the use of the sound system to mirror form or meaning

Gender theories

Dominance (Zimmerman and west) - 

• Men are dominant over women
• Men are more likely to interrupt than women
• Men use language in a way that reflects their power and status
• Women use language in a way that reflects their subordinate position in society
• Men are more likely to assume they are entitled to take over the conversation
• 99% of interruptions are made by men

Deficit (Robin Lakoff) -

• Women should be ladylike
• Males language is stronger, more desirable and prestigious.
• Women use tag questions to show uncertainty
• Women hedge (kind of)
• Women use super polite terms
• Women use empty adjectives (lovely)
• Women use modal verbs (should, would)
• Women have special lexis for things like colours
• Women avoid using coarse language and expletives (swearing)
• Women overuse qualifiers (I think that)
  

Difference (Deborah Tannen) -

 

Status vs. support - men see language as a means of asserting dominance; women see it as a way of confirming/supporting ideas.

 

Independence vs. intimacy - men like to do thing independently; women seek support and company.

 

Advice vs. understanding - men see language as problem solving; women see it as a means of empathy.

 

Information vs. feelings - males are concerned with the facts; women with emotions.

 

Orders vs. proposals - men use imperatives; females use hidden directives.

 

Conflict vs. compromise - men will argue; women will try to find a middle ground.


Discursive theory

• Deborah Cameron goes against all the other theories.
• 'Your genes don't determine your genes'

Write an opinion article in which you discuss your opinion on the differences between the language used by men and women

Have you ever been speaking to the opposite sex and not understood what they are saying? Yeah, well there’s a reason for that…

As you may have noticed, men tend to butt in more during conversation. This is due to the constant need to boost their ego and become centre of attention. Whereas us girls are more willing to sit back and listen to our friend having a gossip. According to fastcompany.com , 50% of women surveyed said they usually don't feel included in business social events, casual meetings or conversations. On the other hand 90% of men felt women had equal opportunities and didn't feel they excluded women. Seems like us women need to speak up more!

Stereotypically women are more 'chatty', which is why they tend to use more discourse markers. Pretty much we like to babble on whereas men like to get straight to the point. An example would be saying 'right' before we attempt to do anything productive or organised.

Although women may disagree, it is said that they tend to use more interrogative language. In men's terms this could mean 'nagging'. More or less it means asking questions frequently, whereas men would rather use imperative language to discuss only the most important topics.

Interestingly, you may not have noticed that women tend to use more descriptive words when stating colours. For example terms such as 'violet' or 'khaki'. Its not very often you hear a man say that he has 'chestnut' colour hair is it?

In case you have ever heard of 'Robin Lakoff', which you probably haven't, there is actually a theory to describe many of the ways that women speak. You may relate...

1. We tend to turn an instruction into a question. e.g. 'OMG we are defo going to that concert, aren't we?'
2. To show we are listening we feel the need to say 'mmm' and 'yeah' for some bizarre reason.
3. Apparently we use 'empty adjectives' a lot? But how else would we describe to the nail technician what shade of red nail varnish Kim Kardashian was wearing at the Grammys?! - so iconic.
   

Opinion article analysis

Publication	Style of writing	Characteristics
Modern tribes: the Twitter quitter	-Sarcastic -Narrative voice due to conversational tone(discourse markers used) -Personal	-Discourse community because people reading will understand the subject specific lexis -Informal
The independent voices: The death penalty situation in the US has just become even more absurd – something has to give	-Informative-statistics and figures -Formal -Biased against the US death penalty	-Statistics -Emotive language to persuade the reader to feel the same opinion
Cosmopolitan: Wait a minute… is this proof that Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio are actually dating?	-Entertainment -Gossip -Not factual -Conversational	-Quotes from different sources -Structure-short paragraphs for a quick read
The telegraph: The BBC needs to forget about the internet and find another Countryfile	-Factual -Predicting future events -Opinion	-Strong biased opinions. E.g. ‘Well, he’s wrong’

 

Discourse communities

A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals.

Linguist John Swales defined discourse communities as "groups that have goals or purposes, and use communication to achieve these goals."

-A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among their members.
-A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback.
-A discourse community utilizes and possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. 

Grice's Maxims

Grice suggested that conversation is based on a shared principle of cooperation.

4 Maxims:

The maxim of quantity-do not say too little or too much
Example-
A: “Where are you going?”
B: “I’m going to the post office.”
In the example, B gives comments to A’s statement without adding other information
 Example of disobeying / violation:
 A: “Are you going to work tomorrow?”
B: “I am on jury duty, but I’ll have to go to the doctor in the evening. I have asked the manager for permission”
In this example, B’s reply violates maxim of quantity because B does not give information as required by A, i.e. yes or no. Instead, B gives more information which is not required or expected at all.
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The Maxim of quality-speak the truth
Example-
A: “Why did you come late last night?”
B: “The car was broken down”
In t he example, B gives the truth that his car was broken down so that he came late.
 Example of disobeying / violation:
 A: “The Teheran’s in Turkey, isn’t teacher?”
B: “And London’s in America I suppose.”
In the example, B’s reply is supposed to suggest that A is incorrect and B violates the maxim of quality
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The Maxim of relevance-keep what is being discussed relevant to the topic in hand
Example-
A: “Where is my box of chocolates?”
B: “It is in your room.”
In the example, B’s reply relates to the question, not talking about something else. Example of disobeying / violation
 A: “Where’s my box of chocolates?”
B: “I don’t know mine either.”
In the example B’s answer is not relevant to A’s question. B says something else which is not about A’s problem at all.
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The maxim of manner-be clear and avoid ambiguity
Example-
A: Where was Alfred yesterday?
 B: Alfred went to the store and bought some whiskey.
 In the example, B’s answer obeys the manner maxim: be orderly, because she gives a clear explanation where A was.
 Example of disobeying / violation:
 A: Why was he arrested?
 B: He stole the money from the bank.

Politeness theory

Politeness theory relies, in part, on the idea that there are different kinds of face:

Positive face and negative face. 

-Positive face reflects an individual's need for his or her wishes and desires to be appreciated in a social context. This is the maintenance of a positive and consistent self-image.

-Negative face reflects an individual's need for freedom of action, freedom from imposition, and the right to make one's own decisions.

How men and women speak differently

Dapper laughs:
There was controversy surrounding a man from London called 'Dapper laughs' , who has become an online phenomenon on social media sites such as Snap-chat. He became the topic of conversation in the media when he made a joke about rape at one of his stand up events. Although the audience were laughing there is an online video of the show that went viral causing a lot of uproar on social media, since he said to a member of the audience, 'shes gagging for a rape'. A online sensation similar to dapper laughs is Nash Grier. He came the topic of discussion when he made a video about what men find attractive in women. Although this was intended to be a fun video, he offended many women and girls. This is similar to the way that dapper laughs speaks because he is objectifying women.