Important sociolinguistic questions

Cards (83)

  • Sociolinguists study the relationship between language and society, examining why we speak differently in different social contexts and identifying the social functions of language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning.
  • One utterance can simultaneously convey both information and express feelings.
  • Sociolinguists are also interested in the different types of linguistic variation used to express and reflect social factors, including vocabulary, sounds, word-structure, and grammar.
  • Sociolinguists use the term variety to refer to any set of linguistic forms which patterns according to social factors.
  • The ethnography of speaking approach is particularly valuable in highlighting the unnoticed ‘rules’ that operate in any interaction.
  • Speech acts such as directives and requests, compliments, refusals and apologies vary cross-culturally.
  • Brown and Levinson identified three social factors which they suggested qualified as universal influences on linguistically polite behaviour: the social distance/solidarity dimension, the status dimension, and the ranking of the imposition.
  • Early sociolinguists and anthropological linguists were typically outsiders in the cultures they researched and described, which had some advantages since it was often easier to identify ways of speaking and rules of interaction that contrasted with those they were familiar with.
  • The ethnography of speaking (also known as the ethnography of communication since it embraces features of non-verbal communication too) is an approach to analysing language which has been designed to heighten awareness of culture-bound assumptions.
  • Emblematic switching or tag switching is a type of code-switching where a linguistic tag in the other language serves as an ethnic identity marker.
  • Caste dialects are characterised by linguistic differences reflecting very clear-cut social or caste divisions.
  • Accent/dialect
    A: Pronounciation alone
    D: pronounctiation,vocabulary, grammar
  • Regional- social dialect
    Rd: pronounciation,vocabulary and grammar according to a geographical area
    sd: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar. According to the social group of the speaker
  • language vary
    overtime,physical space, socially
  • new englishes
    varieties develop in post-colonial societies
    colonial power disappear but the legacy remains
  • analogical creation

    speaker prefer regular patterns over patterns with many exceptions
  • register
    a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific context, situation, occupation, topical
    regligeous,legal,linguistic register
  • dialecto mexicano/puertoriqueño
    mexicano: convierte hiatos en diptongos: kuete
    portoriqueño_ neutraliza r,l
  • develop a language
    code the language
    produce a dictionary
    words available for teaching science
  • embedded language
    a programming language that is designed to be used inside another host language or environment
    provides the grammatical structure of the language
  • matrix's language
    use for the majority of sentence content
    lexical content of the sentence
  • creoles and pidgind
    creoles: develop from pidgins. primarly language of a community. complex grammar
    pidgins: means of communication between speakers of different languages
  • linguistic context

    co-text
    surrounding words
    understanding meaning in language interaction
  • Domain of language use

    code choice in different speech communities
    code or codes selected in different situations
  • Social factors
    1. The participants:
    (a) who is speaking and
    (b) who are they speaking to ?
    2. The setting or social context of the interaction: where are they speaking?
    3. The topic: what is being talked about?
    4. The function : why are they speaking?
  • Social dimensions

    1.A social distance scale concerned with participant relationships.
    2. A status scale concerned with participant relationships.
    3. A formality scale relating to the setting or type of interaction.
    4. Two functional scales relating to the purposes or topic of interaction
  • Linguistic repertoire refers to the various languages and language varieties used in different contexts.
  • "domains of language use" refers to the typical contexts or situations in which particular languages or language varieties are characteristically used within a multilingual speech community.
  • Lexical Borrowing:
    • Involves using a single word (usually a noun) from another language when the speaker lacks the vocabulary in the language they are speaking
    • Motivated by lexical need rather than a choice between codes
  • The "equivalence constraint" suggests switches only occur at points where the grammars of the two languages match (e.g. adjective-noun order)
  • The "matrix language frame" model proposes that one language (the matrix) provides the morphosyntactic frame, while the other (embedded) provides content words.
  • Code-switching Attitudes

    Positive-multilingual communities
    Negative- monolingual
  • When people switch from one code to another for reasons which can be clearly identified, it is
    sometimes called situational switching
  • Fused lect

    Rapid swirching
    it is a sociolinguistic variety
  • code meshing

    codes are integrated in a variety
    Single utterance
  • intra-sentential switching
    switches only occur within sentences
  • inter-sentential switching

    people who are less profi cient will tend to switch
    at sentence boundaries or use only short fi xed phrases or tags
  • Language shift refers to the gradual process by which one language displaces another as the primary means of communication within a community.
  • ethnolinguistic vitality’.

    the likelihood that a language will be maintained
    status,size of population, institutional support
  •  linguistic landscape
    how languages are visually displayed and hierarchized in multilingual societies