Change Revision

How much can you remember?

StructureEG: Intro: Genre, Audience, Subject, Purpose (GASP)Para 1: Lexis & Semantics.Para 2: Grammar & SyntaxPara 3: Orthography/ spelling, GraphologyPara 4: DiscoursePara 5: PragmaticsPara 6: Conclusion

Within each paragraph look at how CONTEXT and PURPOSE may have affected the language used. EG: for lexis.. Context = newspaper, therefore more likely to be using formal language taboo language... The purpose of the discourse is (for eg) to talk about school so may use semantic field of school..

Within each paragraph or 2, try weave in a theorist into your argument.

AO3 = linking the methods (IE lexis/grammar/etc) with specific context of dataAO1/2 = theory (EG: politeness features, Grice's Maxims, accomodation...etc etc)

Theories

• Power• Politeness and face – Erving Goffman• Prestige• Gender

Politeness

• Erving Goffman – invented the idea of face and was extended upon by Brown and Levinson.

• Positive face – need to be loved/ liked/ appreciated

• Negative face – the need for free will• Face threatening act – an act which threatens

someone’s positive or negative face.

Power• Covert prestige – Millroy, Belfast, Cheshire, Reading, Labov,

Martha’s Vinyeard. Men tended to downwardly converge in order to show bond with immediate society.

• Norman Fairclough –Every use of language is a use of power: every piece of discourse is a negotiation of powerEvery text piece of writing has power. This can be shown

through graphology (bold fonts, italics), grammar (polysyllabic words, multi-clausal sentences, longer phrasology, over use/ under use of punctuation, types of sentences), lexis (use of modal verbs – will, must, have) and pragmatics (“you may wish to think again…”

Fairclough

• Synthetic personalisation used to create a sense of fabricated friendship with the readership. Often the pronoun you will be used.

Gender

Robin Lakoff The deficit model – women’s language lacks something when compared to the male norm.

‘Language and a Woman’s Place’ – 1975

She found that women’s language lacks the authority of men’s language, identifying a list of features which characterise women’s language.

She concluded women were socialised into ‘talking like ladies’ with the result that they developed a less assertive language style.

Lakoff

1. Use of special vocabulary (lexicon) centred around household chores

2. Precise colour terms (mauve, lilac)3. Weak expletives oh dear, oh sugar etc4. Empty adjectives – charming, sweet, 5. Tag questions to show uncertainty – isn’t it? -- shall we?6. More polite forms and euphemisms – powder my nose7. Use of hedges, sort of, you know..8. Intensifiers – so, really,

Lakoff

• Script a conversation which illustrates as many of Lakoff’s principles in action as possible.

• Now swap with your partner and analyze the context to the conversation.– Which features of the speaker’s language choices

are interesting– What could they reveal about the relationships /

dynamics involved?

• A police superintendent is interviewing a detective constable and criticising the constable’s performance.

• Super: You’ll probably find yourself up before the chief constable, okay?

• Constable: Yes sir understood• Super: Now you fully understand that don’t you?• Yes sir indeed sir.

Identify use of tag questions. Then think about why they are used and what they convey

The Dominance Approach

• Men control and dominate mixed sex conversation

• This is because men have traditionally been the more powerful / dominant people in society and their conversational style reflects this.

• Ties in with Lakoff’s thinking – women are socialised into behaving in disempowered way, while men are socialised into thinking they should be dominant.

Zimmerman and West• Found that 96% of interruptions in mixed sex

conversations were by men.• Concluded that women had restricted linguistic

freedom and men sought to impose their dominance through applying explicit constraints in conversation

• But:– Research was in 1975– Small sample, all college students in America

Interestingly, they found similar patterns in parent child interactions. What might this suggest?

The Difference Approach

• Males and females use language differently because they belong to different sub-cultures with different attitudes, values and pressures– Girls and boys play together in different ways– Male and female friendship groups operate differently– There are different social pressures and expectations on

men and women. Gender = a social construct and this extends to the ways we expect men and women to behave in conversation

– Many features of female language are explained by the desire to establish and maintain bonds and relationships

Single sex conversation: Difference Theorists

• Jennifer Coates (89)- all-female talk is co-operative. Speakers help to negotiate discussions and support each other’s rights as speakers. These patterns are not found in mixed sex talk – only in sub-culture of female talk.

• Jane Pilkington – women in all female conversations were more collaborative then men in all-male talk. Women used more positive politeness strategies, men were less complimentary.

Compliments and Insults

• Janet Holmes – in all female conversation, women use more compliments as acts of politeness and solidarity

• Koenraad Kuiper – men used insults to bond (express solidarity) and less likely to pay attention to the need to save face.

Pamela Fishman – Mixed Sex Conversations

• Women ask more questions than men• Men speak on average twice as much as

women in mixed sex conversations• Women do the ‘emotional shitwork of

conversations’ – they ask questions, bring people into conversations, make supportive noises etc to keep conversation flowing

The 3 Ds

• The exam board regularly refer to this model in their annual report. They like to see evidence of this in your writing.

• 1. DEFICIT MODEL – The idea that the way men speak is the ‘norm’ and the way that women are socialised into society to act and talk in different ways to men. Lakoff argued for a ‘deficit model’

2. DOMINANCE MODEL – This is the approach that men are seen to control topics of conversation, interrupt more and talk more – Dale Spender, Pamela Fishman, Zimmerman and West

3. DIFFERENCE MODEL – This approach sees man and women as two separate cultures – Deborah Tannen

Deborah Tannen – Mixed Sex Conversations

• Men and women see the world differently and their conversation reflects this.

• Women see the world as a network of connections – men see it as one big competition which they must win and dominate.

Split a clean page in two. On one side draw a symbol / picture which illustrates how men see the world and on the other how women see the world. (The worlds according to Tannen)

1. Status v Support

• For men conversation is a competition, they seek to improve and confirm their status.

• For women, talk is a way of gaining support and approval.

Independence v Intimacy

• Women seek to preserve and promote intimacy, men focus on independance

3. Information vs Feelings

• Men focus on finding solutions and giving advice; women focus on understanding and sympathy

4. Information vs Feelings

• Men focus on sharing information, women on sharing emotions and giving details

5. Orders v proposals

• Men use direct imperatives while women make suggestions ‘why don’t we, let’s…’

6. Conflict vs compromise

• Men voice disagreements clearly while women look for compromise

Technology

• Vowel omission – • Homophonic representation – cul8r (links to

Aitchison damp-spoon etc)• Phonetic spelling• Initialism• Acronym• Variant spelling – deliberate misspelling for effect

(links to covert prestige)Always look to see if your text is a webpage.

Language change theorists

• Aitchison• Crystal

• Prescriptivism vs descriptivism• Standardisation• Technological advancement

Crystal

Most people have a bidilectal speech pattern.Bidilectism – where people use both standard English and their own non-standard regional dialect. Either can be used in a variety of situations.

Crystal suggests due to the globalisation of English, we may, in time evolve into a tridelectal pattern.

The linguist’s view on language change

• Jean Aitchison,• Professor or English language and communication at Oxford University.

She suggests there are three metaphors she uses to describe language change…

Damp-spoon syndrome

Like leaving a dampspoon in the sugar bowl, language changes because people are lazy and cannotbe bothered to use the correctterminology and standard English.Is this a prescriptivist or descriptivist thought process?

Crumbling Castle View• Language is a thingof art and beauty andshould be preserved.

implies that the language of English was gradually and lovingly assembled until it reached a point of maximum splendour at some unspecified time in the past. Yet no year can be found when language achieved some peak of perfection, like a vintage wine.

Infectious Disease assumption

• Bad poor language is caught like a disease from those around us and we should fight it; but unlike a disease, people chose to pick up the language they use.

Questions to ask yourself• Lexis/ pragmatics – what kind of register is adopted? When was is made? How has this affected the

words? Is there a lack of dummy auxillaries, archaic words etc? Are there foreign words? Blended words? Compunding? Why?

• Grammar – What kind of sentence constructions are used? Declarative, interrogative? Compound, simple, complex? Do these show prestige? Syntactically, what is different about the sentence forms? How is the sentence structured? Where do the negatives appear?

• Semantics – Have the meanings of the words changed over time? If so how and importantly why? Have the words broadened or narrowed? What has happened over time to pejorate/ amiliorate the words?

• Spelling/ orthography – How is the spelling? If it is good, is is after 1755? Link to standardisation, and eve then we expect to see some mistakes due to the gradual establishment of standardisation i.e. it didn’t happen over night. Long s? Phased out due to obsalecence of the phoneme, and the proliferation of the printing press from 1476. Still continued use in language as standardisation was an ongoing process.

• Graphology – What does it look like on the page? Why has the writer chosen to use this font?

Most importantly, don’t o anything without understanding the text, how it has changed, when it was written, and what the major changes are.