Theorists

Question 1

Aitchison

Answer 1

Damp Spoon Syndrome - Language changes because people are lazy like leaving a damp spoon in the sugar bowl which is in bad taste. Supposing one language is inferior to another.
Crumbling castle view - Language is a beautiful castle that must be preserved. However, Language has never been a pinnacle and a rigid system is not always better than a changing one.
Infectious disease - Bad/poor language is caught like a disease from those around us and we should fight it, but people pick up language changes because they want to, perhaps in order to fit in with certain social groups.

Question 2

Cameron

Answer 2

Language and Gender
Gender is not a reason for miscommunication, there are many other factors.
Verbal Hygiene - differences between genders are a myth, instead they are fuelled by our expectations and acceptance of gender-based speech styles (adherence called “verbal hygiene”)

Question 3

Coates

Answer 3

Language and Gender
Girls and boys tend to belong to same-sex groups where they will sit apart from one another and generally avoid confrontation and when it is required it is often antagonistic. It has been observed that the peer group of a child is directly influential upon their social linguistic development, and gender is the main principle with girls being encouraged to be typical ‘girls’ and boys being encouraged to be typical ‘boys’. Acknowledges the tendency of girls to stick to playing in smaller groups, their relationship is based predominantly on talk whereas boys will adhere to play in larger, hierarchical groups which are based on joint activity, for example sport, where there is often an undisputed ‘boss’.

Question 4

Trudgill. G

Answer 4

Language and Gender
1. Women tend to over-report, and men under-report.
2. Lower status = more non-Standard English linguistic variables.
3. Standard variants used in formal settings, non-standard used in informal settings.
4. Women are more likely to use standard variants than men.
5. Standard English and Received Pronunciation are the most prestigious forms of English.
Found that men were less likely than women to use the prestige pronunciation of certain speech sounds. In aiming for higher prestige the women tended towards hypercorrectness. The men would often use a low prestige pronunciation - seeking covert prestige to “tough” or “down to earth”.

Question 5

Tannen

Answer 5

Language and Gender
Men and women have different ‘cultures’, they have their own rules, shared meanings and ways of doing things and therefore once they come together, there are misunderstandings

Question 6

Spender

Answer 6

Language and Gender
In it she examines numerous areas of sexism as it appears in nature and in the use of the English language, with particular focus on the way men and women talk and listen differently in couples and in mixed or single sex groups; how men have historically constructed the language; how the word man is used to refer to both men and the species; how God is always seen as male; and how intercourse is described as ‘penetrative’ sex when penetration is something that only the man does.

Question 7

Fisherman

Answer 7

Language and Gender
Conducted an experiment listening to fifty-two hours conversations between American couples. Listened to recordings and concentrated on two characteristics common in women’s dialect, including tag questions for example “you know?”
Begins by examining the use of tag questions being asked and states that women frequently use tag questions ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘couldn’t we?’ following a thought or suggestion. Questions are an effective method of maintaining conversations with males. Argues that women use questions to gain conversational power. She claims that questioning is required for females when speaking with males.

Question 8

O’Barr and Atkins

Answer 8

Language and Gender
Studied courtroom, observing witnesses, and examining them for basic speech differences between men and women. ‘Women’s language’ consisted of; hedges, empty adjectives, apologising more, speaking less frequently, tag questions, hyper-correct grammar and punctuation, indirect requests.
They discovered that Lakoff’s proposed differences were not necessarily the result of being a woman, but of being powerless.

Question 9

Lakoff

Answer 9

Language and Gender
Wrote an influential book in 1975 which stated that women had to adopt forms of language so as to appear unconfident. E.g., hesitation, approval seeking tag questions, euphemistic politeness terms.

Question 10

Labov

Answer 10

Language and Social Class
Certain sounds can be attributed to social class. The /r/ sound is used to show high status
Looked at three department stored (upper, middle, and lower class stores)
Results: middle class workers tried to sound more prestigious (hyper correction)

Question 11

Milroy

Answer 11

Language and Social Groups
Social Network Theory
*Focus on relationships between individuals and the context patterns between group members
*Focus is also on the strength of ties. This social network analysis is used by advertisers to target their products and counter-intelligence to analyse terrorist networks.
*Density- number of connections people have
*Multiplexity- the number of ways people might relate to each other
*Social network- the network of relations between people in their membership of different groups

Question 12

Bernstein

Answer 12

Language and Social Groups
Working class speakers have restricted lexis (there is a deficit model), middle class are more elaborate.

Question 13

Rosewarne

Answer 13

Language and Region
“Estuary English” is a variety of modified regional speech. It is a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and intonation. If one imagines a continuum with RP and London speech at either end, “Estuary English” speakers are to be found grouped in the middle ground.

Question 14

Cheshire

Answer 14

Language and Gender
Recorded the speech of groups of teenagers in an adventure playground in Reading to look at the effects of peer group culture.
The ‘toughest’ girls and boys conformed to the use of non-standard grammatical forms such as ‘ain’t’.

Question 15

Eckert

Answer 15

Language and Social Groups
The Jocks and the Burnouts
Focused her observational research on the social practices of American high school students. She identified with two social groups.

Question 16

Giles

Answer 16

Language and Region
Communication Accommodation Theory
Matched guise technique
Got the same speaker to perform different audiences, using a different accent for each of the audiences.

Question 17

Trudgill. R

Answer 17

Language and Region
‘RP speakers are perceived, as soon as they start speaking, as haughty and unfriendly by non-RP speakers unless they are able to demonstrate the contrary. They are, as it were, guilty until proven innocent.’

Question 18

Drew and Heritage

Answer 18

Language and Social Groups
They suggested that members of a discourse community share inferential frameworks with each other, consisting of implicit ways of thinking, communicating and behaving. They also suggested that there are strong hierarchies of power within organisations, with asymmetrical relationships marked by language use.

Question 19

Kachru

Answer 19

World English’s
Three Circle Model

World English’s
Three Circle Model

Question 20

Jenkins

Answer 20

English and Region
Collected data about the pronunciation features which caused the most communication breakdown in her multilingual classes, and used this research to draw up a list of pronunciation priorities in an ELF context. She called this list the Lingua Franca Core, or LFC.
There are four main areas that the LFC focuses on, which are thought to be essential for students to get right if they are to remain intelligible. These are:
1) Most consonant sounds
2) Appropriate consonant cluster simplification
3) Vowel length distinctions
4) Nuclear stress

Question 21

Sebba

Answer 21

Language and Ethnicity
Studied London Jamaican in the 90s and concluded that the new generation speakers born into London’s Caribbean communities speak a variety influenced by Jamaican Creole, Cockney & RP.

Question 22

Swales

Answer 22

Language and Social Groups
The idea that discourse communities…
1. Share common goals
2. Communicate internally
3. Have specialist lexis
4. Possess a required level of skill and knowledge to be eligible

Question 23

Holmes

Answer 23

Language and Gender
Contrary to popular belief, women use just as much humour as men, and use it for the same functions, to control discourse and subordinates and to contest superiors, although they are more likely to encourage supportive and collaborative humour.
Women managers seem to be more likely to negotiate consensus than male managers, they are less likely to just ‘plough through the agenda’, taking time to make sure everyone genuinely agrees with what has been decided.

Question 24

Miller and Swift

Answer 24

Language and Gender
Their handbook of gender neutral pronoun and that there is no gender neutral pronoun and that is a problem within the English language.

Question 25

Spencer

Answer 25

Language and Gender In it she examines numerous areas of sexism as it appears in nature and in the use of the English language, with particular focus on the way men and women talk and listen differently in couples and in mixed or single sex groups; how men have historically constructed the language; how the word man is used to refer to both men and the species; how God is always seen as male; and how intercourse is described as 'penetrative' sex when penetration is something that only the man does.

Question 26

Koester

Answer 26

Language and Social Groups As well as the idea of power both within and beyond organisations, some researchers have pointed out the way in which employees support each other in tasks. Shows how important phatic talk is in getting jobs done. Workers need to establish interpersonal relationships and have interactions which are not work related.

Question 27

Goodman

Answer 27

Noted that the letter 'X', which appears infrequently in written words is a 'supercharged typographic icon'

Question 28

Crystal

Answer 28

There is a difference between spoken and written language. Spoken has dynamic and prosodic features. 1. His view- that the momentum of English's growth has become "so great that there is nothing likely to stop its continued spread as a global lingua franca"

Question 29

The Queens English society

Answer 29

Advocates Prescriptivism: 'The Society aims to defend the precision, subtlety and marvellous richness of our language against debasement, ambiguity and other forms of misuse...Although it accepts that there is always a natural development of any language, the Society deplores those changes which are the result of ignorance and which become established because of indifference.'

Question 30

Kim and Elder

Answer 30

Language and Region Communication difficulties between Korean and American colleagues - they were abbreviating unhelpfully, using idiomatic expressions, elaborating, etc.

Question 31

Fasold and Wolfram

Answer 31

Language and Region The Black Vernacular 1. Young black working class men omit the post-vocalic /r/, e.g. fou'een instead of fourteen. 2. The better the socio-economic area, the more similarities with white communities.

Question 32

Sapir

Answer 32

Language and Ethnicity 'Everyone knows that language is variable.' In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language. The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf.

Question 33

Wilde

Answer 33

Language and Region 'The great majority of English dialects are of little importance, and we can afford to let them go.'

Question 34

Petyt

Answer 34

Language and Social Groups The lower your class, the more likely you are to 'h-drop'. Moving up in social class means conforming to RP, leading to hyper-correction.

Question 35

Foucault

Answer 35

Language and Social Groups Regarded the role of language as crucial in establishing norms in our thinking and behaviour that seem so natural to us that we don't even question them. He saw that by unpicking the way in which discourses work, we can understand aspects of the society that the author lives in.

Question 36

Pitts

Answer 36

Language and Social Groups A criminologist identified resistance identity (going against the mainstream culture)

Question 37

Nelson

Answer 37

Language and Social Groups Researched the semantic field of business language and compared it to the BNC (British National Corpus).

Question 38

Honey

Answer 38

Language and Social Groups Sociolinguistics Standards of English are falling, and grammar should be taught as Standard English.

Question 39

Powney

Answer 39

Language and Social Groups The Familect Families have their own private lexis to refer to shared meanings.

Question 40

Daniel Jones

Answer 40

Language and Region 1909 - 'teachers whose aim is to correct cockneyisms...' 1950 - 'I no longer feel disposed to recommend any particular forms of pronunciation for use by English people'

Question 41

Berko and brown

Answer 41

Child Language Acquisition Fis phenomenon- can recognise and understand more phonemes than they use.

Question 42

Halliday

Answer 42

Child Language Acquisition Halliday (1978) proposed that there are 7 stages or functions of a child's speech. Instrumental function - language that is used to fulfil a need. Regulatory - language that is used to influence the behaviour of others. Interactional - language that is used to develop relationships and ease interaction. Personal - language that expresses personal opinions. Representational/Informative - language that is used to relay or request. Heuristic - language that is used to explore, learn and discover. Imaginative - the use of language to tell stories and create imaginary constructs.