language change seneca

Question 1

Baileys wave model

Answer 1

• the wave model works on the same basis as a drop of water hitting the surface of a lake - it creates ripples
• essentially, the closer you are to the drop of water, the stronger the ripple
• in this sense, those closest to the geographical location of where the change occurs are more likely to pick up the change

Question 2

Trudgill

Answer 2

• challenges baileys wave model
• believes that change comes from big cities, is passed to big towns and then to smaller towns, missing out country dwellings
• he believes that the core case study of this is Yorkshire, where the archaic ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ are still in use in place of ‘you’

Question 3

Chens S-curve model

Answer 3

• shows that change takes time
• at point 1, the change is made and there is some uptake (usually spreads through a social group) e.g. lol
• at point 2, more people are using it, but this is still limited to a geographical region or group
• at point 3, many more people know it
• at point 4, the change has reached as many people as it can (no change can ever reach 100% uptake, because people resist change, particularly older people)

Question 4

Evaluating chens s-curve model

Answer 4

• can demonstrate that all change needs time in order to be effective
• in this model, change is shown to be effective as long as it can move out of a social group or geographical area e.g. spread of MLE (Drummond)
• HOWEVER chens model also states that no change made can ever be 100% effective, as there will always be some people who resist change or who don’t adopt changes.g. It is unlikely ‘lol’ will be used in 50 years
• we can also see lack of up take in political correctness and other semantic and lexical change e.g. archaic radically changed pejorative epithets like the ‘n’ word are rarely seen today but occasionally in the speech of the older generation

Question 5

Aitchisons PIDC model

Answer 5

• documents the timeline of how language changes:
  Potential: there is the gap or potential for change
  Implementation: the change occurs
  Diffusion: the change spreads
  Codification: the change is made official (e.g. being added to the dictionary)

Question 6

Hallidays functional theory

Answer 6

• Halliday believes that language changes as a result of the needs and requirement of the users of the language. This works in two ways:
  Lexical gaps- there is a gap in the lexicon for something which needs describing
  Function shifts - where a word exists, but we need a different word class ( e.g. google, to google, a google search)

Question 7

Hocketts ‘random fluctuation’ theory

Answer 7

• accounts for errors
• he says when someone makes an error ( a ‘random fluctuation’), these errors can be standardised and recognised as somewhat synonymous
  E.g. iPhones famously autocorrect ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ to ‘duck’ and ‘ducking’, sparking social media attention and memes

Question 8

Substratum theory

Answer 8

• explains how changes can be made as a result of interactions with other languages and variations of English
  E.g. British English saw an increases in the use of ‘like’ as an intensifier as a result of the American English use of it on tv shows like friends

Question 9

Substratum changes

Answer 9

• the media
• invasion
• immigration
• through travel and exploration

Question 10

Crystals tide metaphor

Answer 10

-describes language changing as being like the tide - new things get washed up on shore and the tide takes other things away
- sometimes things make it onto the beach permanently, others only momentarily
- there are never two tides exactly the same, some tides will only impact certain parts of the beach
- the metaphor explains that all change is different, lasts differing amounts of time and affects different groups of people

Question 11

Aitchisons prescriptivist attitudes

Answer 11

• created 3 models to describe attitudes towards language change, as a descriptivist herself
• damp spoon syndrome: implies that people are lazy and disrespectful of language
• infectious disease assumption: the idea that changes are like germs which spread and infect the language
• crumbling castle view: the idea that English was at some point at a ‘golden age’ and is now in a sate of disrepair

Question 12

Innovative lexical change

Answer 12

• blending
• clipping
• compounding
• conversion
• derivation
• back channelling
• reduplication

Question 13

Neosemic shift

Answer 13

• the term ‘gay’ underwent a neosemic (new meaning) shift in the first half of the 20th century from meaning ‘joyful’ to labelling a homosexual
• as a result of societal dislike of homosexuality, the term became pejorated and then narrowed to only referencing a homosexual

Question 14

Bleaching

Answer 14

• moving into the 1970s, the term is broadened to include the use of it as a pejorative for describing something or someone that is disliked
• as use increased the term was weakened or bleached, it lost power

Question 15

Linguistic reclamation

Answer 15

• the work of authority and political correctness has led to:
  Amelioration and linguistic reclamation