Tuesday 23 April 2013

Lexical Change

Over the past few years, the adjective 'gay' has gained an extra meaning. It used to mean 'happy', whereas now it means 'homosexual'.
We are conscious of new words that have recently entered the English language e.g. 'alcopop' and 'CD ROM'.

Borrowing - when a word from a foreign langauage becomes part of the English language e.g. 'pan du chocolat'. The driving force for language change is cultural change.
Neglogisms - new words
Compounding - two or more existing words that are joined together e.g. 'bittersweet', 'girlfriend', 'couchpotato'
Blending - when two or more existing words are merged e.g. 'brunch'
Derivation - when a word (or acronym) is formed from the initial letters of other words e.g. 'dink' (dual income, no kids) 'nimby' (not in my back yard)
Abbreviation - when a word is shortened e.g. 'bike', 'celeb'
Root - when words are made up entirely, often for phonological effect e.g. 'nerd', 'dork'
Conversion - when a word transfers from one word class to another e.g. verb - noun, refil - a refil.
Backformation - new words are made by remaiming affixes from old ones e.g. 'editor' was formed from 'edit'.
Eponym - a new word is created from a person's name e.g 'Hoover'.

Many new words are coined every day but the vast majority of them are NONCES (temporary words that never properly entered the English language e.g. the eponym coined in the early 90s: to bobbit - this word is still alive, meaning to emasculate.

Meaning extention - a word's meaning widens e.g. in medieval times, the noun 'hierarchy' was only used to rank different angels, in the 17th century it was extended to the ranking of cleargymen and today, used to rank anything.
Meaning narrowing - a word becomes more specialised e.g. 'meat' (Old English mete) used to mean all food, 'deer' once described any animal.
Amelioration - a word gains positive connotations e.g. 'sophisticated' used to mean not highly developed.
Rejearation - a word develops negative connotations e.g. about women 'mistress'.

David Crystal states that contemporary English uses words borrowed from over 120 languages. Many of them are borrowed from Anglo Saxon times.
ask (Old English)
question (French)
interrogate (Latin)

Monday 22 April 2013

Syntactical Development

Development of a child's ability to create grammatical constructions by arranging words in an approprite order.

One-word stage: 12-18 months
Child speaks single-word utterances 'milk', 'mummy'.
Groups of words may be used as a single unit 'allgone'.
In many situations, the words simply sserve a naming function.
Holophrases - single words or phrases that convey more complex messages.
'juice' - to mean: 'I want some juice' or 'I've spilt some juice'. Context, intonation and gesture helop the caregiver to understand the meaning of the holophrase.
Although the child's utterances are limited, their understanding of syntax is more advanced. Evidence - children at the one-word stage can understand and respond to two-word instructions e.g. 'kiss mummy'.

Two-word stage: 18 months
Two-word utterances begin to appear. Usually grammatically correct sequence. Common contructions: 'Daddy sleep', 'Draw birdie', 'Suzy juice', 'Daddy busy'. When repeating an adult, children often omit elements, such as articles and auxiliaries, but verbs retain correct order:
'Look, Ben's playing in the garden'
'Play garden'
Utterances focus on key words: Grammatical function words, such as determiners and prepositions are commonly omitted as they carry less important information.
Meanings of two-word utterances: range of complex meanings can be expressed.
Possession: 'Mummy car'
Action: 'Paul eat'
Location: 'Teddy bed'
The scope for ambugiuty (a word or phrase that had more than one meaning) arises at this stage because of the omission on inflectional affixes.
Commonly possessive and plural 's' and past tense 'ed' are absent.

Telegraphic stage: 2 - 2 and a half years
Three and four-word utterances begin to be produced. Some will be grammaitcally complete...'Lucy likes tea', 'teddy is tired'. Other utterances will have grammatical elements missing...'Daddy home now', 'Where Joe going?'
Like a telegram, they include key words, but omit elements such as determiners, auxiliary verbs and prepositions.
A wider range of structures will be used. Questions (interrogatives), commands (imperatives).

David Crystal: From Riddle to Twittersphere

David Crystal: From Riddle to Twittersphere

Grammatical Development

Acquisition of inflections - a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute, such as tense, mood, person.

Understanding of grammatical rules - how do children produce grammatically accurate constructions so early in their development? Rules? Imitiation?
Berko - 'Wug test':
'wug'
'this is a wug'
'this is another one, there are two of them'
Complete the sentence...'there are two...'
3-4 year old: 'wugs'
Grammatical rule for plural 's' was being applied.

Overgeneralisation
2 and a half - 5 years: grammatical errors show an awareness of rules. They overgeneralise/overregularise, trying to make the language more consistant than it is. e.g. 'sheeps', 'wented', 'runned', 'mouses'.
Although children apply grammatical rules, they are not conscious that they have acquired them and would not be able to exaplain them - no mental linguistic awareness.

Questions
1. Two-word stage: questions rely on rising intondation only. e.g. 'me milk'
2. Telegraphic stage: question words aquired. First, 'what' and 'where', then 'why', 'who' and 'how' = 'where daddy gone?'
3. Post-telegraphic stage: begin to use auxiliary verbs and inversion; where any of several grammatical constructions where two expressions switch their order - invert. Therefore...'Joe is here' becomes 'Is Joe here?'
However, questions involving 'wh' words are not always correctly inverted. 'Why Joe isn't here?'

Negation
The accurate expression of neagative occurs in three stages...
1. Single dependence on the words 'no' and 'not' used independently or infront of expressions 'no want', 'no go bed'.
2. Third year: 'don't' and 'can't' appear. They begin to appear after the subject and before the verb of the sentence e.g. 'I don't want it' and 'Sammy can't play'.

Verb tenses
There are at least 5 different ways that we form the past tense in English:
Past simple - 'I fell' BUT... 'I have fallen', 'I was falling', 'I had fallen' are formed using:
An auxiliary verb: have/had/was etc
A past participle: 'fallen', 'done', 'broken' etc
A present participle: 'falling', 'snapping'
Present tenses
'I walk'
Also the continuous form using auxiliaries and participles: 'I am walking'
Future tenses
'I will walk'
Therefore, children have difficulty acqiring language and opt for simpler forms e.g. regular verb: 'I kicked'. No surprise they have difficulty with the auxiliaries 'I done it'.

Interrogatives and  negation
The formation of a question also uses auxiliaries: 'Do you like?'...'Can I have?'...as does creating negatives; 'Mummy doesn't like'.


Jean Berko - 'Wug test'

Jean Berko - 'Wug test'

Child language acquisition - theories

Behaviourist thoery (imitation and reinforcement)

Skinner - argues that children acquire language by imitating the speech of others. When a child produces words successfully and they recieve praise and encouragement, they will subsequently be motivated to repeat the behaviour. The child may even see that their caregiver is happy and approving. This reinforcement assists the child's use of langauge and encourages development.

Evaluation - in terms of phonological development and acquring lexis, imitation does play an important part. Children develop regional accents, showing that they do imitate sounds around them. However, all children pass through the same stages of language development regardless of the amount of adult reinforcement they recieve.

Children cannot acquire grammar by imitation as sentences are rarely spoken in the same way twice. Children say 'wented' and 'mans' for example - they have not heard an adult say these words and they have not been encouraged to make these virtuous errors.

Jean Berko - 'wug test'
Children discover the principals that underline the constructions and generate new utterances. In Berko's experiment, she said to the child, 'this is a wug, now there are two of them, what are they?' The child responded 'wugs'. Then Berko said to the child 'what are they doing?' and  the child said 'wugging'.

Nativism (innateness theory)

Naom Chomsky - proopsed that children have an innate ability to extract the rules underling language from the words they hear around them. He believed that when the human brain is exposed to speech at birth, it will automatically begin to recieve and make sense of utterances because it is programmed to do so. Chomsky called this a 'language acquisition device' (LAD). The programmed patterns 'primary linguistic data' are general and the child has to learn the rules by applying them.

Evaluation - the existance of  'LAD' would explain:
The impressive speed at which children acquire language.
Children of all cultures pass through the similar stages of linguistic development.
The existance of grammatical features common to all languages.
Children are able to understand and use new sentences and constructions without having had any previous experience of them.
However, Chomsky's theory underestimates the power and role of language as a social phenomenon. (Interaction with other people). It implies that language acquisition will happen automatically. Case studies, such as the 'Genie' case indicate that human contact is essential for becoming a competent speaker.

Therefore both Skinner's 'imitation and reinforcement' and Chomsky's 'nativism' theory are relevant and play an important part in children's acquisition of language.

The critical development period

Lennenberg developed Chomsky's idea of 'LAD'. He hypothesised that there is a critical development period within which a child must be exposed to language for them to develop normally. Lennenberg advocated that a child must acquire the basics of language through human interaction by the time they reach puberty.

There have been occasional cases of 'wild' or ferrel children who have been deprived of normal human contact and therefore never acquired language. Some have been discovered at a young age and rapidly caught up on linguistic development. However, those cases discovered as teenagers, rarely manage more than a few words. For example, Russian child Oxana Malaya, who was abandoned by alcoholic parents as a baby and brought up by dogs, was able to name objects, but couldn't actually string a sentence together.

Piaget - 'egocentricism'

Piaget argues that children are 'egocentric', meaning they regard themselves and their own opinions/interets as most important or valid. As a result, they often use persona pronouns, such as 'my' and 'mine'.

Input thoeries

Bruner - input theories stress the role of interaction in the development of langauge, focusing in particular on the interaction between children and caregivers. He calls this 'child-directed speech'. A child's language acquisition is said to depend on the contribution or input made by parents and 'significant others'.

How caregivers alter their speech, when speaking to children, giving them specific opportunities to take part in discourse:
Caregivers speak more slowly to children. They use simplified constructions and less complex vocabulary, this makes it easier for a child to imitate their caregiver.
Caregivers expand the child's speech. e.g. 'All gone sweets', here the child has used an irregular sentence structure and omitted the definite article 'the' and the verb 'have'. Therefore the caregiver helps to correct the child by saying 'Yes. The sweets have all gone, haven't they? In this way, the child's vocabulary and sense of sentence structure is gradually extended.
Caregivers introduce new lexis by using familiar sentence frames 'what's...?', 'it's a...'
Parental interaction introduces conventions of conversation: turn taking, question and answer sequences etc, assisting with pragmatic development.

Engles

Although there are very similar patterns in langauge used by adults of various kinds towards children, there are also differences. Fathers tend to be more demanding than mothers, using more direct questions and a wider range of vocabulary.

Distinctive characteristics of CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH

Phonology:
Slower, clearer pronnunciation. Makes language more accessible.
More pauses between phrases/sentencesto give child opportunity to absorb what is being said.
Higher pitch and more range of pitch. This helps to keep the child's attention.
Exaggerated intonation and stress. The sing-song intonation in particular makes this variety of speech particuarly distinctive.

Lexis:
Simpler, more resirictive vocabulary. More concrete nouns, relating to the child's 'here and now'. All objects named in broad categories e.g. 'dog', not 'spaniel'.
Diminutive forms of nouns e.g. 'doggie', 'horsie'.
Reduplication e.g. 'mamma', 'choo-choo'

Grammar:
Simpler constructions
Short constructions with many pauses, to mark the end of grammatical units.
Sentence frames e.g. 'where's...?', 'do you want a...?'
Grammar and meaning are simplified to correspond with the child's actual ability in language. e.g. a two year old's average sentence is 4 words, so the caregiver will also use 4 words.
Frequent use of imperatives.
High degree of reinforcement to new words or structures to clarify new meaning.
Frequent questions to elict a response.
Use auxiliary verbs, developing grammatical ability.
Personal pronouns infrequent. Proper nouns used instead. 'Give it to mummy', not 'Give it to me'.

Discourse:
Questions and tag questions.
Expansion - to build on a child's speech amd encourage new structures.
Feedback.
Face-to-face communication.

Bruner - puts language acquisition firmly into context, emphasising that language gets things done. 'Children learn language initially to get what they want, play games, stay connected with those on whom they are dependent'.
Proposed the existance of LASS (Language acquisition support system). Refers to the support for language provided by parents/caregivers.

Evaluation of input theories - the benefits of child-directed speech are clear but it is not possible to identify precisely the links between structures parents use and their appearance in their child's language. It doesn't seem to be essential that adults address children in a particular way as children reared in cultures where adults do not alter their speech when addressing children, still appear to acquire language at a normal rate of development.

Language Change - Esssay response

Text F and text G are both written reports of court cases; text F a lot older than text G. When reading text F, the first difference I noticed from the way in which texts are constructed today, was the lack of paragraphs. The whole text was written in one large paragraph, whereas today, this wouldn't be the case as texts are split into separate paragraphs to make them easier to read. There is also a lack of full stops throughout text F, with the use of very long sentences. This could suggest that the writer wasn't very educated and possibly from a lower social class.

However, text G consists of three separate paragraphs, which could indicate that standardisation took place in between the two texts being written. It could also suggest that the writer of text G was more educated than than the writer of text F as they have used paragraphs correctly, by today's standards. Despite this, text G features an example of non-standard capitalisation 'IRONSIDE', which would have been influenced by the introduction of Caxton's printing press in 1476. Nevertheless, this may have been used because the writer wanted to place emphasis on this particular noun.

Text F features many examples of different spellings. For example, it has spelt the verb 'show' as 'shew' and also a 'long s' has been used, which signifies the age of the text. In addition, it consists of a lot of contractions. 'Cheapn'd', which would be spelt 'cheapened' nowadays and 'carry'd', which nowadays would be spelt with the inflection 'ed' on the end, with the dropping of the 'y' and addition of 'i'. Furthermore, 'whereupon' would now be two separate words and 'no Body else', a compound. The use of the capital letter 'B' in the middle of the word could be evidence for standardisation not yet having taken place.

There are many other examples of capital letters used in the middle of sentences, rather than after full stops or for nouns, as they are today, which is another example of non-standard capitalisation. For example, 'the Door to shew a Woman'. However, there aren't any examples of this in text G, which again, may suggest that standardisation took place between the two texts being written.

Another aspect of text F, suggesting a lack of standardistaion, is the use of italics in the middle of paragraphs. However, the writer may have used this in order to place emphasis on these particular lexical choices, making them stand out from the rest of the text. Some of the nouns written in italics, for example, 'Nathanael Sirmas', may have been used when referring to an important person, whom the writer wants to stand out, suggesting they have power. The writer has emboldened the noun 'William Marvel' at the beginning of the text, which highlights the importance of this person. The writer may have done this because he is the person being convicted of the crime, that the text is reporting and so needs more attention to paid to it.

During text G, there is an example of an article being omitted from a clause. 'It was stated that prisoner, who was exceedingly well connected. Here, the writer has omitted the article 'a'. This could possibly reflect the writer's lack of intelligence, suggesting they are from a lower social class. Nevertheless, the writer may have done this merley to make the text more concise. Text G also consists of archaic language 'hitherto'. This is a word that is no longer used in English, indicating the old age of the text. Another term featuring in text G that is no longer used is 'money's. Nowadays, we would just use the noun 'money'.

Text F and G both have a formal register and feature many examples of field specific lexis. For example, 'prosecutor' and 'jury' in text F and 'prisoner' and 'defrauded' in text G, signifying that they are both reports of court cases.

In conclusion, it is evident that language has changed dramactically since these texts were written. It is also clear that text F consists of many more linguistic differences than text G, which shows that text G is a newer text. For example, there are more examples of variations in spelling, non-standard capitalisation, a lack of paragraphs and long sentences. Therefore, it could be argued that all of these aspects suggest that standardistaion took place between the writing of the two texts.