LING320 - Final Review

• Sociolinguistics


  Relations between language and society (language in its social context)
• Labov (1972)


  • William Labov
  • Form of social behaviour
  • Used by humans in social context, communicating ideas/needs/emotions to one another
• Chomsky (1972)


  • Ideal speaker-listener (homogeneous speech community)
  • Irrelevant conditions: memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors → applying it in actual performance
  • Knowledge of language (competence) = not production, what you know about language

  
• Linguist


  • Community language
  • Individual language
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1916)


  • Langue
  • Parole
• Chomsky (1965)


  • Competence
  • Performance
• Chomsky (1986)


  • I-language
  • E-language
• Competence


  The speaker-listener's knowledge in its language
• Performance


  The use of language in concrete situations
• The description of the ideal speaker-listener's intrinsic competence
• Research in language = you only really need one native speaker to analyze its dialect (speech community)
• Chomsky


  • Intuitions about language
  • Interview, ask opinions of alternate forms for grammaticality
  • Structure of the language

  
• Linguistic structure is closely associated with homogeneity
• Speakers of the language have access to their intuitions about competence and can report them
• Labov disagrees with Chomsky's points
• Labov


  • Variability/heterogeneity (there is no such things as homogeneous speech community)
  • There is inaccuracy in speakers' intuition
• "Me and him…" vs. "He and I…"

  • Overt and covert prestige
  • Overt: standard mainstream
  • Covert: non-standard mainstream
• "Me, I"


  • Can be distinguished based on the subject and the object of the sentence
• "Walking" vs. "Walkin'"


  • Formal/informal distinction
• When collecting data, how often do we collect truthful data for analysis?
• Think of when we ask an individual how often they swear…
• Stop Sign Theory


  Figuring out if individuals stop at a stop sign (e.g., in a neighbourhood) vs when a police car is present
• Labov argues that


  • Speech community is heterogeneous, displays linguistic variation
  • Much of that variation is not random, but orderly displaying systematic correlations with social factors (such as age, sex, social class) and speech style (formal vs. informal)
  • An adequate theory of language must include a theory of linguistic variation, rather than dismissing variability as theoretically unimportant
  • Competence-performance distinction is artificial
  • Communicative competence: Performance - variation (who uses which variable forms in which social contexts) is one of the things that native speakers "know" about their language
  • Empirical competence: Linguistic theory should not be based on speakers' intuitions or analysis
  • Observer's paradox: How to observe language without observing language... Intrusive effect on linguistic behaviour
  • Vernacular: the way people talk when they are not being observed (unselfconscious speech)
  • Orderly heterogeneity: Systematic observation of vernacular speech

  
• Labov → data comes from observations, not asking what is grammatical and what isn't
• Hypotheses about the relationship between language and society

  • No [theoretically important] relationship
  • Society influences language
  • Language influences society
  • Bidirectional influence
• Variety


  A set of linguistic elements with a common distribution (neutral term)
• Dialect


  • Regional variety (e.g., Southern English = dialect of the South)
  • In English, "dialect" is non-standard
  • Subvariety of a language
• French: written tradition
• English speakers = insecure about dialects
• Every has their own identity in terms of countries (culture) which can be perceived to be offensive when using the term dialect
• Why do people have different dialects?

  • Isolation develops different ways of speaking
  • All languages change all the time
  • As communities grow across large seas or other examples, the change in one community may not affect the other. When in the same region, the change in community's dialect spreads to all vs. if they were isolated
  • Divergence of communities
  • 1 community + 1 community (in the same region) = 1 dialect
  • 1 community + 1 community (in isolation) = different dialects
• Change in terms of social media can influence dialects within communities around the world
• Other examples: education, …
• Dialect differences


  • Language change + expansion of speech communities
  • With time, dialects can become separate but historically related languages
• Language or dialect


  Mutual intelligibility or national sentiment?
• Change in time
• Scandinavian "languages?


  • Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic
  • They are sister derived from a common mother
  • All visibly very close
  • They can read each other languages when it is written
• Mutual intelligibility a scalar measure, sometimes asymmetrical
• Bell (1976) proposes 7 criteria for assessing status of a language or variety


  • Standardization (codification; grammars, dictionaries, literatures, …)
  • Vitality (stability, gain/loss of speakers, domains of use, …)
  • Historicity (association with ethnic identity, cultural history)
  • Autonomy (taxonomic, relation to other languages, varieties)
  • Reduction (of status, resources, social or economic uses)
  • Mixture (relative "purity")
  • De Facto norms (popular attitudes proper usage, good and poor varieties, or speakers)
• Is Canadian English standardized?