Questionnaire

Questionnaire

I am a student at Shenfield High School and I am exploring into the Standard English Language. You do not have to participate in this questionnaire if you do not want to and your answers are kept confidential.

1. What is your nationality? (Please tick one box)

White British

American (African and North/South)

Asian

Middle Eastern

European

Other

2. What is your age? (Please tick one box)

20-30        31-40         41-50          51+

3. What does the word ethnicity mean to you?

4. Do you think that the use of Standard English has decreased? If yes,  why and how?

5. Please read these two sentences and express your opinion of these sentences and which social class you think they belong to?

Sentence 1:

Why ain’t you gonna come out tomorrow?

Sentence 2:

My Lord, what time will we be attending the ball tonight?

6. Do you think that the language used by Black British people is standard or not? If yes, how?

7. Do you know anyone who is of an Afro-Caribbean ethnicity? If yes, what is their dialect and how is it different to the Standard English dialect?

Dialect is the language variety of a geographical region or social background. Different forms of grammar(structure of language), lexis (word choices), phonology (word sounds) and semantics (word and phrase meaning) affect dialect. 

Linguistic Levels

Linguistic Levels

Graphology

Graphology is the features which contribute to the appearance of a text on a page. The graphological features of a text determine subtle and important aspects –e.g. genre and ideology.  

Graphological features include

-font (type, size etc)

-headings

-layout (bullet points, paragraphs, columns etc)

-captions

-pictures

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist who found the field of structural linguistics. Saussure is called the father of modern linguistics. Structural linguistics is contrast and equivalents. He came up with sign and signified. Sign is the sounds or letters used to indicate what we are talking about and signified is the actual concept. He said the relationship between sign and signified is arbitrary which means no natural reason why we call a cat a cat.  He also talks about synchrony which is the complete language system at one point in time and diachrony which is how that language has developed over time.

Iconic sign

An iconic sign is a direct picture of the thing it represents, although this is often simplified.

Symbolic signs

These draw on an association or connotation and are usually defined by cultural convention, based on existing cultural models. 

Discourse Structure

Discourse structure is the way texts are organised ad sequenced.  Discourse structure is one of the elements of style: those choices a language user makes to suit context, genre, audience and purpose.

William Labov

William Labov is a sociolinguist who studied at Harvard University. Labov and Waletzky’s introduced a narrative theory based on the study Labov conducted in Harlem. They say that narrative means consisting of two temporally clauses so that reversing the order of the clauses would change the story. 

They introduced six narrative categories:

1-Abstract-indication that a narrative is about to start and the speaker wants a listener’s attention.

2-Orientation-who, what, where and why of the narrative. Set the scene by providing contextual information.

3-Complicating action-the main body providing a range of narrative detail

4-Resolution-final events to give narrative closure

5-Evaluation-additions to the basic story a highlight attitudes the listener’s attention at important moments

6-Coda-a sign the narrative is complete

Examples of Discourse Structure:

Non-sequenced lists-notes, to do list

Sequenced lists-recipes, terms and conditions, instruction manual and script

Logical arguments-persuasive article and debate

Problem-adverts may establish a problem

Desire-fulfilment-advertisers may make us feel desire before offering to provide us with fulfilment

Analysis&explanation-school essays

Narrative accounts-news reports and shorts stories

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of the intended meaning of a text.

Paul Grice-Grice's Maxims

Paul Grice was born on the 13^th March 1913 in Birmingham, England. He says when we communicate we assume that we and the people we are talking to will cooperate to achieve shared conversational ends. 

The four maxims which Grice says we all try to adhere to in conversation are:

Quantity-use an appropriate amount of detail

Quality-speak the truth and do not knowingly mislead

Relevance-keep what is being discussed relevant to the topic

Manner-avoid vagueness and ambiguity

Politeness is known as a super maxim, in that people are mindful of others personal or face needs in conversation.

Goffman:

Positive face-associated with feeling valued and appreciated

Negative face-desire to feel independent and not be imposed

The four aspects of context can all affect pragmatics:

Physical context-the setting of a conversation-library, football field etc

Epistemic context-the background knowledge shared by a speaker and his/her audience-the basic rules of basketball

The information that has already been shared in the discussion is known as linguistic context-all background, topics of conversation and intonations

A sarcastic, sad or joking tone of voice can easily change the meaning of a sentence

Lexis

Lexis means the individual word choice. It is also the collective term for the word stock or vocabulary system of a text.

Lexis might also be used to create imagery or to create a mood. Emotive lexis-words used to evoke emotions in the reader or exaggeration might be used mostly in a piece of persuasive writing. For a newspaper article there might be a lack of emotive lexis, in an attempt to be detached.

This is a transcript of a conversation between three boys playing a video game. Louis is playing and James and Greg are watching.

Louis: and now (.) just watch (1) watch me kill him

James: [laughs]

Greg: throw your | light saver

Louis: | No (.) death by force grip is way better (.) slower

In the transcript, a semantic field of fighting is created through the lexical choices such as: kill, throw, saver, death, grip. It is affected by the context.

Other Lexical Terms:

-Monosyllabic (one syllable)
-Disyllabic (two syllables)
-Polysyllabic (more than two syllables)

-Low/high register (higher=posher/more formal)

-Low/high frequency (higher=more commonly used)

-Slang; colloquialism; cliché; taboo; jargon

Antonym-opposite in meaning

Hyponym-used to designate a member of a class

Semantics

Semantics is the study of word and phrase meaning. Semantics can be applied to different kinds of symbol systems, such as computer languages and similar coding systems. 

It is important to recognize the generally accepted meaning of a word or term rather than the literal meaning. The term “water pill” is an accepted term for a kind of diuretic. These pills are often taken by people who are retaining too much water in their bodies. If we were to look at the literal meaning of the word “water pill,” the term would seem to indicate a pill filled with water. It is quite the opposite; when the pill is ingested it causes a person to lose water.

Writers often play with semantics to create interesting stylistic effects or to create a style suited to a particular context or audience.

Other Examples of semantics:

-Crash can mean auto accident, a drop in the Stock Market, to attend a party without being invited, ocean waves hitting the shore or the sound of a cymbals being struck together.

-A human can be referred to as a male, female, child, adult, baby, bachelor, father or mother.

-The word motion can mean walk, run, fall, plod, hurry or fly.

-The word create can mean build, make, construct, erect, compose or imagine.

-The word on can have many meanings, such as - on call, on the roof, on cloud nine, on edge, on fire, on purpose or on the phone. 

Phonology
Phonology is the study of the sound system of a langauge. E.g. onomatopoeia, rhyme etc.

Phonetics - the actual sounds of speech considering how sounds are physically articulated and language phonomea (accents).

Phonemes - an individual sound studied without all its complexities and possible variations.

Why is phonetics useful?
-Helps understanding of differences between speech and writing - mode.
-Insight into public attitudes toward langauge variation (accent variation and stereotyping)

 Orthography - technical word for spelling
     
Consonant groups:
Plosives - b,p,d,k,g
Fricatives - f,vs,z,sh (vibration)
Africates - ch (church), dj (judge)
Nasals - m,n,ng
Approximates - r,j,w


Phonetic Representation
Saussaure and semiotics - claim there is no relationship between the sounds we make or the written symbols we produce and the thing being described.

Lexical onomatopoeia - works on our ability to draw similarities between the sounds of the words and the real words - e.g. crash

Non-lexical onomatopoeia - equally draws on similarities between a sound and the real word - e.g. grr

Ellision - when sounds are left out - e.g. library - libry

Assimialtion - when sounds that are next to eachother become more alike - e.g. handbag - hambag

Liaison - a sound is inserted between words or syllables to help them run together more smoothly - e.g. motherate - mother rate  

Phones - general term for speech sounds

Allophones - the different speech sounds of a phoneme 
   
  

Twitter research

Research into twitter from Damita D

Accent and Dialect

Accent and Dialect

Accent is a certain way in which people pronounce a language=associated with a certain country, social class or area.

Dialect is a regional language that is noticeable by grammar, pronunciation or vocabulary. 

Cockney

Cockney is the second most famous British accent. It originated in the East End of London. It is typically associated with working class citizens of London and it contains several distinctive traits.

The main characteristics of cockney dialect are dropping of the letter “H” from many words, using double negatives, contractions and shifting vowels which drastically change the way words sound.

Also, a variety of consonants are replaced with other sounds, for example ‘frushes’ meaning thrushes. Sometimes, the final consonant of a word is dropped, for example ‘ova’ for meaning over.

Cockney rhyming slang is when a word is replaced with a phrase that usually contains a word that rhymes with the original word, for example “dog and bone” meaning “telephone.” Other examples of rhyming slang is ‘bacon and eggs’-legs, ham’n’cheesy-easy, plate of meat-street, Sweeney Todd-flying squad (police) and there are many more.

Another feature in the cockney dialect is glottal stopping; this is when the letter t is pronounced with the back of the throat in between vowels, e.g. better is ‘be’uh’. There is also L-vocalization which is when the l at the end of words often becomes vowel sounds, for example ‘pal’ sounds like pow. Finally, cockneys use Th-Fronting, were th in words like think or this is pronounced with more forward consonant depending on the word, i.e. thing becomes ‘fing’, this becomes ‘dis’ and mother becomes ‘muhvah.’

A cockney is someone who is born within hearing distance of the sound of Bow Bells (the bell sounds of the Church of St Mary Le Bow) and refers to an East London accent. To most people that don’t live in London, cockney means a Londoner. The cockney language can go back to the 19^th century when Sir Robert Peel formed the first Police stationed at Bow Street, London.

Examples of cockney people are Ray Winstone, Danny Dyer, Helena Bonham and Jamie Foreman. 

Geordie

Geordie usually refers to the people and dialect of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, in Northeast England. It may also refer to accents and dialects in Northeast England in general. Geordie is one of the most difficult to understand of typical British dialects.

There are grammatical and lexical features of the dialect. For example, in broad Geordie dialects, us is often replaced by we:

she took we, she wouldn't let we go, I mean, she, she did, she’d always took we on these trips…

In the Geordie dialect there are words that have a different meaning than Standard English.  For instance:

…used to get dropped off, off the bus in the mornings and, uhm, they picked us up on the way back…

Us in Geordie also refers to the first person-me

There are a variety of older dialect words such as gan (go), nae (not), clarts (mud) and many others. 

Other features of the Geordie accent are:

-The foot-strut merger-when the syllable in ‘could’ and ‘foot’ is pronounced with the same syllable as ‘fudge’ and ‘strut’.

-Non-rhoticity-r is pronounced at the end of a syllable or before a consonant

-The ‘ai’ in kite is pronounced ɛɪ, so it sounds a bit more like ‘kate.’

-The 'au' in “about” is pronounced u:  in strong dialects. For example “boot.”

Examples of famous people that are Geordies are Ant and Dec, Cheryl-Ferdinand Versini, Jimmy Nail, Sting, Alan Shearer, Tim Healey and Rowan Atkinson

Australian

Australian accent and dialect is spoken in all parts of Australia. Australian English is a fairly new dialect of English and is just over 200 years old. Children would have spoken the very early form of Australian English, these would be children born in Sydney. They would have spoke in similar ways to eachother in order to help bind the peer group and express their group membership. A new dialect was created by the first generation of children and it was to become the language of the nation. A wide range of different dialects from all over England (mainly in the South east, particularly London) would have been exposed to these children in the new colony. The new dialect would have been created from elements bin the speech yhat they heard around them. This new dialect would have been strong enough to deflect the influence of new children even when settlers arrived.

The three types of Australian Accents:

There are three types of Australian accents which are broad, general and cultivated.

A Broad accent is associated with Australian masculinity. Examples of people with a broad Australian accent are Steve Irwin, Paul Hogan and Bill Hunter. This accent is only spoken by a small part of the population but it has a great deal of cultural authority. The broad Australian accent was spoken by very women and if they were to sue it they would sound like they was making farting jokes.

A Cultivated Australian accent is usually spoken by women that want to show a feminine and sophisticated image. Newsreaders of the government funded ABC had to speak with the cultivated accent up until the 1970s. Due to not many Australian men being able to speak in this accent, male newsreaders were imported from England. This speaker is associated with the upper class. The Cultivated accent is similar to a British Accent. Ex-prime minister Malcolm Fraser and Cate Blanchette use this accent.  

A General Australian accent is a mix between the broad and cultivated accents. As they are reasonably neutral in principles, most of the speakers believe that they do not have an accent. They realise that they speak differently to the broad and cultivated speakers. About 80% of Australians speak with this accent. An example of someone who uses this accent is Nicole Kidman.

The biggest features of the Australian accent:

-The diphthong in ‘kite,’ ride’, ‘mine’ etc:

The more broad that the accent is, the more this moves toward the diphthong in words like ‘choice’ (i.e. retracted and raised). A Cultivated Australian speaker might pronounce ‘buy’ like (baɪ), whereas a Broad speaker might pronounce it like ‘boy’ (bɒe).

-The vowel in ‘mouth,’ ‘loud’, ‘out,’ etc:

The more broad that the accent is, the more the first part of this diphthong moves toward the ‘e” in “dress.  So a Cultivated speaker might have a diphthong closer to (aʊ), whereas a while a Broad speaker might pronounce it like an ‘eh-aw’ sound (ɛɔ).

Other features include:

-Words like ‘fleece,’ ‘keep,’ etc are a more pronounced like the diphthong in Broad Australian accents.
-Words like ‘face’ and ‘make’ are pronounced like the diphthong in American/RP “kite” in broad accents.
–Finally, words like ‘goose’ and ‘food’ have a fronter ‘oo’ vowel and pronounced like (ʏ) in Broad accents.