Language and Region Flashcards
(9 cards)
What is the Choy and Dodd theory?
Teachers judge their students’ abilities.
Teachers make a judgement on their students’ abilities based on the way they speak.
What is the Seligman, Tucker and Lambert theory?
Teachers judge their students’ speech.
Teachers perceptions of students were heavily influenced by their speech.
What is the Foulkes and Docherty theory/
‘th’=f/v study.
The replacement of ‘th’ with an ‘f’ or ‘v’ and how this phonological variant has spread from its original origins in London.
What is the Ives Theory?
Bradford/London study.
Ives commissioned 2 studies to be carried out in London and Bradford in order to explore new dialects which had a growing use of code-switching. In each study the participants were questioned and subsequently discussed their language use, and ther dialect. Some of the key features of the dialect he found were replacing the Standard English verb form, changing an abstract noun to a verb, and changing an abstract noun to a less abstract form.
What is the Jones theory?
Prescriptivism/Descriptivism.
Jones was a descriptivist linguist, but also a man of his time. In the early 20th century, teachers of English were seen as ‘missionaries’ of speech, whose job it was to ‘correct’ aspects of regional language by removing them and replacing them with RP and standard English, which were seen as hallmarks of refinement.
what is the Rosewarne theory?
Estuary English.
David Rosewarne coined the term ‘Estuary’ in 1984. He described the accent as ‘modified regional speech’ and placed it along a continuum between RP and Cockney. Many linguists see it as an umbrella term, covering a range of southern dialects.
What is the Giles Matched theory?
Guise Technique.
This involves participants listening to the same speaker using a range of different accents and then passing judgement on each different variation.
in terms of personality, RP was seen as the most confident, intelligent and ambitious, but also cold and ruthless. Northern accented speech was characterised as honest, reliable, generous, sincere, warm and humorous. The factor of persuasiveness is more complex to analyse because someone can seem persuasive because of their social status, or friendliness, so persuasiveness isn’t really an independent dimension.
What is the Milroy theory?
Belfast study.
Milroy found that the the stronger the social network the greater the use of vernacular (everyday, informal, non-standard, spoken language) or non-standard linguistic features.
They also show that apparent norms, like women’s well-documented preferences for prestige forms (hypercorrection), can be reversed (consciously or otherwise) by the need to express something more.
What is the Trudgill theory?
Social class, RP. Trudgill's study on the effects of social class on language use explored the differences between working and middle class backgrounds in their pronunciation of certain sounds, including the velar nasal /n/ at the end of words like 'running'. He concluded that changing the velar nasal /n/ to an alveolar /n/- saying 'runnin' instead of 'running'- was more likely to feature in working class speech than in middle class speech, although he also found differences between men's and women's use of the non-standard forms. He estimated that only 3% of speakers used RP.
