What Youtube can show us about language!

There are many clips on YouTube that involve the older generation filming the younger one being cute with language, whether that is just starting to babble or go into the first or second word stages but it can be useful for data on how children improve and use language.

To start, this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKD6jzUxkek, which is a baby coping his Dad when he makes a "ahhhh" noise. This helps to show that from a young age, we as human know the idea of how turn taking works. Who speaks first, then who speaks next and so on. It also shows how we as parents respond to the level that our child is speaking, beginning to use pragmatics and explore the interactive nature of communication like this link of a child using lots of baby talk like babbling/non-verbal communication to talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13hRsyEbX4Q and how in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZGi57Zl1Qk&feature=related, the child is just beginning to pick up certain softer vowel sounds to try and sing the words to happy birthday.

Gesturing and body language also becomes a great deal and it becomes easier to express what they want to say. This link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gSZfW4gVhI&feature=related shows a bit more extreme gesturing as this child at the age of 1 is using sign language to communicate but the parents is also responding to her child's correct sign in positive tones. This is important as it helps to motivate  the child to carry on to speak or gesture in this case, helping the child to want to pick it up quicker.

This is a good link to find out more detail: http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm

Horizon - How do we speak??

So how do we speak? Horizon is a documentary program that aims to explore questions like this and its not specifically to do with children but the bases come from CLA - Child Language Acquisition. It discusses how we as humans are defined by are use of language to communicate and how speech and language defines us as a species. We are very sophisticated in our way on learning language as children can pick it up with minimal effort compared to adults and learn through a natural process and not being taught! However, this leads to the main debate in CLA. Do we learn it through nature or nurture? Are we born with the DNA coding to learn to speak or od it the environment around us that helps is to speak. How we learn to speak is even a mystery to the experts!

One expert in the field is Professor Deb Roy, a cognitive  scientist who wanted to see and hear how children learn to speak so his home became the lab, set up with camera and microphones as his son became the guinea pig. It became known as The Speech Home Project and up to the age of three, he filmed his son everyday learning to speak. The data saw his son go through the different stages of babbling, single word stage, two word stage and finally including more grammatical structure with the words. After going back through the data, he began to discover the way his wife and him were talking to their son affected how he learnt to talk. By positive responses and reinforcement, his son seemed to pick up language quicker. This is the same with all parents with kids. Simplifying their words and syntax and elongating words, which is known as convergence, shows they were doing it to be to be in the same level as the child. This is an example of parentese. Phonological awareness is how children begin to learn by listening to the tone, phonological features and intonation.  This lead onto longer sentences as the child developed and to the age of 5, a child will have learn over 5,000 words. Mainly verbs, nouns and determiners. All this research could lead us to see how words are born but at the moment, Deb Roys research is the clearest we have.

Human's are the only species that can convey complex meaning and thought through language, which makes us unique. Humans have tried to teach animals like the chimp Viki, however it didn't work as chimps have different vocal apparatus to us and there are certain brain processes that are stoping animals to speak. And also human can have this to shown in the case of Steve Speer. An accident cause him to have a stroke and has trouble recalling words. With the help of improved scanning, they managed to see what happened and how the damaged affected language response. More research looks into how babies only a day old could recognise its mothers voice showing we tune to the sound of speech and speech we recognise as soon as we are born. Another example that points to the fact we are born with the innate ability to speak is from a guy called Christopher, who is autistic and knows over 20 languages and has the ability to learn the languages quickly.

The Godfather of linguistics, Noam Chomsky theory is the basic of language is innate and easy though it looks complex for children to pick up. How the sentence structure, word order, meaning  and sound need to be learnt at an early age, which comes back to the nature/nurture debate.  The Forbidden experiment also come into this as they want to see if isolation of a child up to the age of 7 will make learning language difficult? Geni, wild child's and zebra finches experiment are the closet they have got to seeing if this affects learning of language and the zebra finch's showed that 3/4 generations after language could be learned again. However, due to the ethics this experiment with humans, it wouldn't be acceptable to do. Follow this link here to find out more about Geni: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4QA

Chomsky's L.A.D is an important part of the nurture debate to why we can speak. He believes we are born with the blue print to have language that needs to be stimulated. This could be back up from the ground breaking recent research of the Fox-P-2 gene that was would to control out ability to speak in our DNA. This is evidence that we are born with ability to speak and support for L.A.D. However, Skinners Critical Acquisition Period can also use the gene ti show that you need both nurture and nature to develop language because even though you are born with this gene, it needs to be stimulated. There needs to be a connection between speech and cognitive learning. Origins and idea of language had been shown to develop unconsciously over time and there are many more factors that can effect language. When identified, all the components can show us how to be human.

To find this documentary, follow this link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=PZatrvNDOiE

Beginning the A2 course

Important link to the course specification, past papers and the frameworks:
http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/as-and-a-level/english-language-b-2705

This link is to David Crystals blog, which I belive is more useful than his website as it is more personal and link better to why he is so intrested in language:
http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/

The Enlgish and Media magizine last eyar was very useful in producing vidoes, articles ect that had linguists speak about the different theories on technology, power and gender but also other useful topics aswell:
http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/index.html

Analysis of the Railcard Advert

This text is a leaflet advertising a 16-25 railcard and trying to inform and persuade the audience of how it could be a good purchase. Even though the railcard can be brought from the ages of 16, I would say that the audience for this leaflet is aimed for the older audience or young adults who would be travelling a lot and maybe purchasing a railcard would be useful. The graphology of this whole leaflet plays a big part in the advertisng of the railcard as it is set ouw like a movie poster which straight away attracts the eye of the audience as this layout is eyecatching and uses the feautures of a movie poster to advertise their porduct. The images of the two charcters, boy and a girl, you can automtaically tell that they are sterotypes the representations of them. The girl looks young, attarctive, blonde and somone you would imgaine to be a star in a big movie who is longingly looking up for the handsome boy character, who is looking worried, which could be linked to the text about whether he can be the hero the auidnce expects him to be and save the girl. This links to the text of "He gets 1/3 off rail travel - but can he get her back?" as the rheotrical question also becomes a narriatve hook adding to the idea of the plot the movie senario the poster is trying to percieve. Its add to the persauive nature of the text as it helps to draw the auidnce in and get the idea of will he be the hero and get the girl back and whether the purchase of the railcard will also help this motive. The title "Saving Precious Penny" also helps to add to the whole punning of the movie theme the railcard advert is using as "Penny" can either be the girls name or actual money but the fact the adjective "Precious" can be used for both suggests that both is worth trying to achieve.

The text at the bottom of the leafet is like the small print of the movie poster as it is all capitalised but some words are bigger than others, which shows that the company has tried to keep the theme going on throughout the whole text. Its starts off with the imperative "Buy a 16-25 railcard" which makes it have a commanding tone towards the audience and therefore persauvie to go and buy one of these railcard. A personal pronoun "You" has also been used which gives the text a personal connection to the auidince so the auidnce feels like this text is directed at them and therefore useful item to purchase. Words like "Epic" have also been used in the small print which could be condsidered as film desriction specific lexis. This is imporant to keep the theme up but also how describing getting a railcard using film lexis which is used to persaude auidnces to go and watch this film can also be used to persaude the rail companies auidnce of 16-25 to buy a railcard. The whole movie theme is somthing this perticular age group can relate too and is cleverly used to be persauive for a different motive.

Pantene Advert

This advert shows us how even though men and women do exactly the same things like jobs, that they are automatically given labels to define them for example in this case of a job, the male is described as the boss where as the female is described as bossy.This shows how language towards male and females are different and males have the stereotypically high status lanaguage where as women have the language which people look down upon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjNcZvwjxI

Peter Trudgill and Robin Lakoff

These two researchers look into language and gender and what they discovered.

Peter Trudgill, 1970's

Trudgill wanted to find out how people's ways of speaking varied and how so used Norwich speech as an example. One of the variables he looked at was the gerund ending of "ing" in words like "walking" and "running" and he found in Norwich that they missed this out on the end of words like "walking" to say "walkin" making it sound like there was an "n" on the end of the sentence. He also found that it wasn't just unique for Norwich as he says:

"Nearly everywhere in the Eng-speaking world we find this alternation between higher-class/formal ng and lower class/informal n. It goes back to the fact that in Old English (and later) there were two forms, a gerund ending in -ing (walking is good for you) and a present participle ending in -end (he was walking). The -end form was the ancestor of -n' and -ing (obviously) of -ing. "

The two have been merged and sorted into two terms in forms of prestige and "correctives" has happened in the last 300 years. Upper class Edwardian said words like "huntin", "finshin" and "shootin" which shows just how recent it is.

His study discovered:

1. In all social classes, the more careful the speech, the more likely people were to say walking rather than walkin'. 2. The proportion of walkin' type forms was higher in lower social classes. 3. The nonstandard -in' forms occurred much more often in men's speech than in women's, and this was true for all social classes. 4. When women were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the standard -ing forms more often than they really did. 5. When men were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the nonstandard -in' forms more often than they really did.

Robin Lakoff, 1975 

Lakoff did a study into language and specifically women's. She wrote a book called "Language and Women's Place" that looked at the woman's language is often now common place.Her work looks at attention to class, power, and social justice in addition to gender.








Lakoff says that women's speech can be distinguished from men in a number of ways:

1. Hedges: Phrases like "sort of", "kind of", "it seems like"
2. Empty adjectives: "divine", "adorable", "gorgeous"
3. Super-polite forms: "Would you mind..." "...if it’s not too much to ask" "Is it o.k if...?"
4. Apologise more: "I'm sorry, but I think that..."
5. Speak less frequently
6. Avoid coarse language or expletives
7. Tag questions "You don't mind eating this, do you?".
8. Hyper-correct grammar and pronunciation: Use of prestige grammar and clear articulation
9. Indirect requests: "Wow, I'm so thirsty." – really asking for a drink
10. Speak in italics: Use tone to emphasis certain words, e.g., "so", "very", "quite"

She also developed the idea of the "politeness principle", which has three maxims that are usually followed in interaction, which we look at also in language and power. These are: Don't impose, give the receiver options, and make the receiver feel good. If any of these are not used, then it called "flouting the maxims" and she says that you need these follow them to have a good interaction.

Language and Gender

Language and gender can seem a very intresting idea to look at as at first, I don't really think about how women and mens laguage could actually be all that different as we all use it and get to know what type of language is new, when it acceptable to use certin language and how to use it in conversation. However, when you actually look into it you can begin to see the differences which could also link back to the ideas of sexism, sterotypes ect that have been made known. The idea that women could be considered the more chatty ones, good at changing topics but threre could be more masculine elemants especially with certin lexcial feilds in topics like football and maybe a bigger use of swear words which links to being sterotypical.

The other day, someone came up with the thought that they couldn't imagine men really using the term "OMG" and this is just one tiny example that actually ahows how language is differently used and how it has been interpreted into which gender would more likly to use. This links into the idea that women supposedly have a wider, superioir language use to men which is just a veiw but is this a valid point? Are women more domaint in language and how is this proven? What effects this? Nature or nurture? Age? Status? These are some of the ideas I would like to explore and find out ehy the divide between the two genders language had becoming more noticble over and become some linguists like Deborah Cameron, research topics and what they have found out helps to exaplin the divide.

This is an intresting article my Deborah Cameron which gives her veiw on what this whole debate is about and what conclusion he reaserch has come up with and her owh opinions:
www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/01/gender.books