English Language - Paper 2

• Accommodation theory


  Howard Giles' idea that we all adjust our styles of speaking and writing to 'accommodate' others
• Convergence


  When speakers' styles become more similar
• Divergence


  When speakers' styles become more different
• Accommodation is usually temporary, but sometimes over time it may become permanent change
• Acrolect


  The prestige language that provided the bulk of a creole's lexis
• Basilect


  The most creole, most divergent form of the language
• The acrolect for Jamaican Creole is English
• Alien fruit experiment - see Kirby, Simon
• John Agard


  • Poet who often writes in a Caribbean dialect but gives interviews in Standard English
• Code-switching


  The ability to change language style to fit the situation
• Creolisation is when a community of children grow up speaking a pidgin as one of their native tongues, creating creoles</b>
• Creoles have had grammatical features stripped out of the lexifying language, but often features from speakers' other languages are adopted to serve those same functions when creolisation filled them back out into full languages
• Crumbling castle


  Jean Aitchison's metaphor for how prescriptivists see language as something bequeathed to us by our ancestors that is falling apart around us
• Damp spoon


  Aitchison's metaphor for snooty reactions to language change, like putting a used teaspoon back in a sugar bowl
• Declinism


  The belief that language is declining, often accompanied by beliefs that society in general is getting worse
• Deficit model


  Holds that there is a standard, and anything differing from that is lacking or inferior
• Difference model


  The idea that two things are fundamentally different, and problems come from mis-match or clashing styles rather than one of the things being somehow bad
• Dialect levelling


  The idea that distinctive local dialects are gradually being overtaken by the dialects of large cities
• Economy


  One of the three forces that drive change in all languages, the pressure on words to become shorter
• Exonormative


  A language community that looks to other places for its standard forms
• Endonormative


  A language community that generates its own norms
• Expressiveness


  One of the three forces that drive change in all languages, the constant search for new words and phrases to express things powerfully
• Euphemism treadmill


  When words for low-status or politically charged groups are altered to try to improve attitudes to those groups, but the new words also become stigmatised over time
• Folklinguistics


  The study of ideas that non-linguists have about language
• Functional theory of change


  Halliday's idea that language changes to fit the needs of its users
• Hebrew was revived as a national language of Israel after the state was founded in 1948, despite having no living native speakers for hundreds of years
• Hypercorrection


  When speakers aspiring to higher status produce a particular feature with a frequency that exceeds that of even the high-status groups it's associated with
• Incrementation


  Labov's idea that each new generation takes the non-standard features used by the previous generation as a base level and then increases them further
• Infectious disease


  A metaphor some people use to think about language change, where features considered unpleasant spread from person to person contagiously
• Kirby's alien fruit experiment demonstrated that speakers seek patterns and look for logic in unfamiliar lexis
• Labov's research in New York department stores suggested that class, in terms of measure of just income or profession, is less important than cultural and social markers in determining language use
• Lexical gap


  When a language lacks a word that it seems should exist
• Robert Lowth wrote 'A short introduction to English grammar' in 1762, criticising features like ending sentences with prepositions and double negatives, rules many prescriptivists hold onto today as 'correct'
• Research on Martha's Vineyard found that locals who felt swamped by tourism increasingly adopted features from the dialect of local fishermen, while young locals intending to move away used these features less
• Neologisms


  New words, formed by a number of different processes
• Nicaraguan sign language is a creole that developed spontaneously in deaf schools in Nicaragua in the 1980s
• Nynorsk is a language created in the late 19th century by Ivar Aasen, intended to be more Norwegian than the Danish-influenced Bokmål
• Petyt's research in Bradford in 1985 found that H-dropping correlated closely with class, with working-class speakers dropping Hs far more than middle class speakers
• Political correctness


  Deliberate attempts to change how people think about oppressed and minority groups by changing the language used to describe them
• Random fluctuation idea of change

  The idea that language changes for no more reason than automobiles adding or removing fins, which is not credible