AO1 for CLA, Language Change and Investigation

Syntactical moods = declarative, imperative, exclamitive and interrogative

-Tense = child struggles to make past tense in telegraphic stage and language change there is use the present tense to disguise opinion ad a fact

-Punctuation = holophrase to show mood. This is phonological features and rising intonation = relationship between child and caregiver.

 Minor sentences - female use more phonological features to add more meaning to language or man use them to state.

 - How the sentence is construct - omitting lexis and virtuous errors!

- Older texts will be quite verbose and complex for an educated audience or pre-standardisation

- Types of sentences = main, subordinate, minor, simple, compound and complex.

- F.P.A = spoken language -hedges and fillers and spontaneous. Is the Introduction for language change

- Caregiver scaffolding - answer interrogative with interrogative but in language change because that person doesn't know the answer

- Nouns = language we borrowed, needed verbs but new objects needed a name - the British Empire - BBC English - OED - Oxford English dictionary

- Concrete or abstract e.g political speeches = allow audience to make decisions

- Context - synonyms = slightly different way of saying the same thing

- Figurative language

- LFL = formal, romanised, latinised = language of power

Language change - The Written Word

We know how much language has changed due to the written word especially the invention of the printing press leading to the written word being produced for mass audiences, which equals the increase of standardisation. Interesting link: https://books.google.com/ngrams this link goes to a site I where you can explore how words come and go from the 1800 up to 2000. It's a good website to explore as see how far words for back!

The written word needs to be mentioned in relation to F.P.A in an exam context.

Stephen Fry's Planet Word - Spreading the Word

Writing allows us to speak to the past and see our future. Nowadays it's about seeing the difference between speaking and  writing and how it's converging. Writing became an optional extra, showing us the innate ability of how to use language. Chomsky and Lennenburg would agree with that statement! The access of reading and writing helps us to explore the past and discover more about it. But how did writing come about.

Fry sys they may be due to taxation and currency but all we know is that once it started it never stopped. It led to stories poems laws and events being written down that's begin with you had to be educated to understand it.

Introduction to the alphabet was an important step as it was about trading and spreading the word. Religion also have writing and it became a key influence to language change as it showed instrumental power of religion for example the Vatican as no one can edit Gods word. It added synoptic ideas and helped to preserve myths, stories and rules.

A major revolution for writing with the events of the printing press by William Caxton. It was about romanisation of language and hope things alphabet simplicity.. Books became free from handwriting and Geoffrey Chancer was the first authors to get his work printed. However, he died before he could see his work printed but had still requested standardisation of language.  This house to suggest that standardisation is revolutionary as the bigger the audience the bigger the shared understanding. BUT it is over a period of time.

The influence of the printing press is still seen today as little letters as still called lower case letter and bigger letters are still called upper case letters. This terminology was all thanks to the printing press.  It helped to create diversity and change people's attitude to learning and knowledge, otherwise known as enlightment.

Technology is a major factor in language change. It helped to create new ways of thinking like the creation of library's and how now they are using the Internet to help become the new search engine for books and the e-book. Amazon for example has now become the biggest publishers today, which their electronic versions of books helping to increase sale of the much beloved stories we know. The Internet as become the way we consume knowledge these days as if texts are printed, it is every hard to edit them afterwards . However, online they can be change of corrected for consumer purpose like Wikipedia. There is less pressure to be correct to. There is more scope and that leads into in informalisation of language.

Comparing now and the past, the generation today write a lots more than they used too. Amd it's know not just the elite that can understand and use it. The immediacy to find out more and to create a direct connection between the reader and the writer has become an important purpose. However, it is always hard to predict where it is going to go next.

Deb Roy - "The Birth of a Word"

So on TED talks, there is a talk by Mr Roy himself, talking about his groundbreaking research that is called "The Speech-Home Project. In this talk, he goes on to explain what it was about and how he did it so it was about putting cameras up in every room in his house to record his sons speech and movement up to the age of 2. An interesting thing to pick up and is useful to the CLA part of the exam is known as the Caregiver Feedback Loop. This is about caregivers utterances and language spoken by the caregivers being restructures to converge into simple language for children to understand. This is the scaffolding for children to build up their language. So he shows his son going from "gaga" to water in 6 months due to this. A nice quote you can pull out from this is that Deb Roy compare language to a flower blossoming and the different stimuli that help to the flower to achieve its full potentional is what caregivers do to help stimulate a child's language. He goes on to explain different part of his experiment like how context is important for lexis and how they now have moved it in from the CLA aspect and onto looking at media coverage.

Here is the link: <iframe src="https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

AO2 of Language change

AO2 is about:

- knowing what to write to have a good phonological order

- standardisation of English is very important to look at like the invention of the printing press

- theories and stages like the telegraphic stage in CLA

- this can be linked back to AO1 

Orthographied change

- Older texts = archaic lexis

- Lexis that has been spelt differently = spelling mistakes ➡️ spelling changes to accommodate spoken language but NEVER say a word has been spelt wrong!

- Accomdation theory - social and contextual factors, David Crystal e.g polish section in the market means therefore some words have been intergrated in our vocab

-Kagston = in the15th century, he encouraged standardisation as texts became aimed at a wider audience 

- Standardisation e.g schools adopting rules from Latin and Greek and adopting Anglo-Saxon = the introduction of prescriptive ideas 

- It was a need for people to communicate as more people began to learn to read

- Technology has become a main way of how language has changed! This TED talk by John McWhorter: http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk takes the descriptive view on how texting develops out language and we shouldn't critise it, we should just let it devlop.

Samuel Johnsons Dictionary, 1950

- made by a process of recording words 

- shows a prescriptive attitude to language, where as now could be described as a more descriptive attitude being formed

1955 - 2014: what contexts have influenced our language? Vogue? Immigration? Music?

Stephen Fry - French insitution meets to decide words going into French dictionary where as in England words are more likely to be suggested to be added in

This link: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/25/vape-this-years-selfie-2014-word-of-the-year goes to tak about this years word of the year: vape! The guardian describes it as the new selfie, which was last years word of the year! Interesting to find out how it came about to be this years word of the year! 

Interesting bits and bobs found this week

This first link: http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/nov/14/mind-your-language-grammar-nazi, is a interesting piece about a conformed "Grammar nazi", someone who picks up on the smallest mistakes in punctuation and grammar like apostrophes and points it out to the victim, who can have give many reactions. She goes onto talk about how this was once her until she made a mistake herself and then got an idea of what the other side was like. She now looks at language in a different way, so instead of sneering and feeling smug, she learns to give people the benefit of the doubt. This article is a good description on how we all make mistakes in out grammar but straight away judging about it, is not the way forward.

This second link is about a useful guide for terminology for analysing texts. From the simplest bit of terminology to the in depth details. Need help with any of this then click here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/index.htm

This final link is a bit of fun about the Bristolian accent and dialect and what is interesting about language in this part of the country, who uses it and how it is easily stereotyped into a language that is not formal and can easily be looked down on. This article argues both sides in a fun debate of a city near us: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-17523102

Standardisation of English

Diachronic approach - study of history and evolution of a language 

Synchronic approach - the study of language at a particular point in time 

Descriptive attitudes = David Crystal 

Prescriptive attitudes - Standard English, politcal correctness = context 

This link here to an article called: "The hyperbole we love to hate" 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/04/hyperbole-love-hate-language-linguistics

Looks at how we exaggerate objects and experiences in reviews, for food ect to be more appealing to the audience when the metaphors and adjectives used can been seen as over the top. The word "literally" as well has become more it use to also add persuasion to make the experince seem more real. The it is done is for attentions and the one example of how the media is helping to change our language and the replacement of hedges and fillers is increasing.

The AO1 and 2 language change overview

So when it's comes to anylsing those texts, what do you know you will be looking out for:

AO1

High and low frequency lexis. There is more likely to be more low as that is lexis that is not used a lot in the present and old texts will use more of it that H.F.L. E.g the word "grandiose"

Why? Due to to different Form, Purpose and Audiences of the text. Audience for olders texts are more likely to be aimed at the higher classes, who are educated and literate. So the register will be expected tot be more formal.

Field specific lexis/jargon will also be important for looking at old texts as it will help to relate to the context.

Semantic fields = meaning of words and that will lead onto the idea of semantic shifts = how the meaning of words have changed over time e.g "gay" - happy, homosexual reference and now an insult and how it has become "banta" (uni lad). Also, the universal use of "he" in gender.

Grammar: punctuation and syntax structure - more complex. Why? Audience again.

Power - F.P.A - instrumental and influence of religion 

AO2  

Theory = David Crystal

Influence of external factors - descriptive and prescriptive

Standard and non-standard English 

Political correctness in language 

Standardisation snd dictionaries- Johnson

The printing press and Caxton - mass audience