Summary: Prescribing And Describing

Read the summary and the most important questions on prescribing and describing

• 1 Vocab words week 1

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• 1.3 vocab week 4

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• pervasive (social factors)

  Present or noticeable in every part of a thing or place

• 2 Introduction lecture describing

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• Linguistics describes language as ..... (3) (1,1,3)

  • Language as rul-governed
  • Distinguishing between 'possible'and 'not possible'
  • Interest in variation rather thean judement
  • Why do some people use double negation while others don’t?
  • Is language changing?
  • How does using double negation affect how a person is seen in the world?

• Why is RP / SSBE seen as the correct pronunciation of English?

  • “It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed.” From A Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary School (Burell, 1891).
  • The statement that RP is seen as regionless is not really true because it stigmatizes.

• Who has the authorithy on 'correct' English?

  • For English there is no one institution which decides at a governmental level what is prescriptively correct (cf. France’s Académie Française)

  • Instead there is a lucrative branch of bookselling/blogposting dedicated to prescriptivism

• Who is most likely to grow up speaking SSBE?Who is less likely to grow up speaking SSBE? 

  Who is most likely to grow up speaking SSBE?
  

  • South-East of England
  • Middle-class or above

  Who is less likely to grow up speaking SSBE?
  

  • Anywhere else
  • Working class speakers
  • Migrants, L2 speakers
  • Non-white speakers

• How can a variationist descibe a dialect?

  • Describing a vowel variation depends on which dialect you describ it from. This is the reason you have to make use of the lexical set to describe a sound.
  • Know the difference between variety, variable and variant (see example on the slide)
  • make use of the four types of variation

• Dialect and accent as continuum, what does this mean?

  • The varieties we study are not separate entities
  • Most speakers have a range of style and features on a continuum between standard and non-standard; Sometimes between different varieties.

• What does rule-goverend mean in terms of the conext of language?

  A system that serves as the foundation of human communication. This concept emphasizes that language operates according to specific rules and structures that govern how we create and interpret meaning.

• Northern Cities Shift (NCS)?

  • a major, ongoing chain reaction in American English where vowels in the Great Lakes region (Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, etc.) rotate in a clockwise pattern in the mouth, making sounds like 'a' (cat) shift towards 'e' (get), 'e' (bed) towards 'i' (bit), and so on, creating a distinct accent that's often unnoticed by locals but obvious to outsiders, signifying a cultural and demographic shift in the industrial Midwest.
  • chain reaction

• 2.1 describing week 2

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• What has changed in the Autralia and New Zealand English? (the main thing)

  • Loss of rhoticity
  • This is seen through orthographical evidence and English grammer notes through the time.