Oral assignment l.w.e 4 (1)

Oral assignment l.w.e 4 (1)

• 1.
  Language andsocial variation Chapelet,P. Mannella, M.
• 2.
  Index Social Variation Slide3 Sociolinguistics Slide 4 Social Dialects Slide 5 Education and Occupation Slide 6 Speech style and Style-shifting Slide 7 Prestige and Speech Accommodation Slide 8 Register, Jargon and Slang Slide 9 African American English Slide 10 Characteristics of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) Slide 11 Bibliography Slide 12
• 3.
  Social variation Not everyonein a single geographical area speaks in the same way in every situation. Certain uses of language are more likely to be found in the speech of some individuals in society and not others. It is important to consider that people who live in the same region often speak in quite different ways according to their education and economic status. Differences may be used, implicitly or explicitly, as indications of membership in different social groups or speech communities. A speech community shares a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language.
• 4.
  Sociolinguistics  It isconcerned with the study of the linguistic features that have social relevance for participants in different speech communities.  It focusses on the relationship between language and society. Sociology through the investigation of the role language plays in the organization of social groups and institutions.  We use all these connections when we try to analyze language from a social perspective. Anthropology through the study of language and culture. Social psychology, particularly with regard to how attitudes and perceptions are expressed and how in-group and out-group behaviors are identified. It has strong connections with other fields:
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  Social dialects  Thestudy of social dialects has been mainly concerned with speakers in towns and cities.  It is social class that is mainly used to define groups of speakers as having something in common.  The two main groups are generally identified as “middle class” • Those who have more years of education and perform non-manual work. • “Working class,” those who have fewer years of education and perform manual work of some kind.  When we refer to “working-class speech,” we are talking about a social dialect  The terms “upper” and “lower” are used to further subdivide the groups, mainly on an economic basis, making “upper-middle-class speech” another type of social dialect or sociolect  Certain features of language use are treated as relevant in the analysis of social dialects. These features are pronunciations, words or structures that are regularly used in one form by working-class speakers and in another form by middle-class speakers.  Examples: ain’t - used by the working class. home is regularly pronounced as [heɪm], among lower-working-class speakers, and as [hom], among the others.
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  Education and occupation • Wegenerally tend to sound like others with whom we share similar educational backgrounds and/or occupations. • People who leave the educational system at an early age use certain forms that are relatively infrequent in the speech of people who go on to complete college. • People who spend more time in the educational system tend to have more features in their spoken language that derive from a lot of time spent with the written language. Example: threw is more likely than throwed • As adults, the outcome of our time in the educational system is usually reflected in our occupation and socio-economic status. Examples: In the department stores, there was a regular pattern in the answers. The higher the socio-economic status of the store, the more /r/ sounds were produced. • Social markers: They are pronunciation features. Examples: the final pronunciation of -ing with [n] rather than [ŋ] “sitting and drinking” (lower class and less education) “[h]-dropping”. It occurs at the beginning of words and can result in utterances that sound like I’m so ’ungry. (In contemporary English, this feature is associated with lower class and less education)
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  Speech style andstyle-shifting The most basic distinction in speech style is between formal uses and informal uses.  Formal style or “careful style” We pay more careful attention to how we’re speaking.  Informal style or “casual style” We pay less attention to the way we are speaking, the rules or structures A change from one to the other by an individual is called style-shifting.  Many research have been made concerning STYLE SHIFTING and it has been found that middle-class speakers are much more likely to shift their style of speaking significantly in the direction of the upper middle class when they are using a careful style. It was also confirmed that if speakers in a middle-status group try to use a prestige form associated with a higher-status group in a formal situation, they have a tendency to overuse the form.
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  Prestige and Speechaccommodation “PRESTIGE” Direction in which certain individuals change their speech. Overt prestige  That change is in the direction of a form that is more frequent in the speech of those perceived to have higher social status.  “Better” or more positively valued in the larger community. Covert prestige • Certain groups do not exhibit style-shifting to the same extent as other groups. For example, lower- working-class speakers do not change their speech style from casual to careful as radically as lower- middle-class speakers. • They may value the features that mark them as members of their social group. They may value group solidarity. “SPEECH ACCOMODATION” The variation in speech style is also influenced by their perception of their listeners It refers to our ability to modify our speech style toward or away from the perceived style of the person we’re talking to. Convergence: We can adopt a speech style that attempts to reduce social distance. We use forms that are similar to those used by the person we’re talking to. Examples: 1 - C’mon Tony, gizzalook, gizzalook 2 - Excuse me. Could I have a look at your photos too, Mrs. Hall? Divergence: a speech style is used to emphasize social distance between speakers. We use forms that are distinctly different. Example: TEENAGER: I can’t do it, sir. TEACHER: Oh, come on. If I can do it, you can too. TEENAGER: Look, I cannae dae it so …
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  Register, jargon andslang  Register is a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific context, which may be identified as situational (e.g. in church), occupational (e.g. among lawyers) or topical (e.g. language).  Jargon, a defining feature of a register, is special technical vocabulary associated with a specific area of work or interest.  Jargon helps to create and maintain connections among those who see themselves as “insiders” in some way and to exclude “outsiders”.  An example of medical jargon is “a.c” meaning “ before meals” concerning the time when taking a medicine. Or in the computer field, RAM, backup…  Slang is more typically used among those who are outside established higher-status groups.  Slang, or “colloquial speech,” describes words or phrases that are used among younger speakers and other groups with special interests .  It can be used inside a group to share ideas and attitudes as a way of distinguishing themselves from others  Examples: Bucks (for dollars or money)  Taboo terms are words and phrases that people avoid for reasons related to religion, politeness and prohibited behavior. They are often swear words, typically “bleeped” in public broadcasting (What the bleep are you doing, you little bleep!) or “starred” in print (You stupid f***ing a**hole!).
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  African American English Also known as Black English or Ebonics, AAE is a variety used by many African Americans in many different regions of the USA.  Those different features have often been stigmatized as “bad” language, following a regular pattern whereby the social practices, especially speech, of dominated groups are treated as “abnormal” by those dominant groups who are in charge of defining “normal.”  Social barriers such as discrimination and segregation serve to create marked differences between social dialects.  This social dialect has covert prestige among younger speakers in other social groups.  Certain features of AAE may be used in expressions of social identity by many who are not African American.
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  Characteristics of AfricanAmerican Vernacular English (AAVE) The term “vernacular” has been used since the Middle Ages. It is a general expression for a kind of social dialect, typically spoken by a lower-status group, which is treated as “non-standard” because of marked differences from the “standard” language. • In AAVE and other English vernaculars there is a tendency to reduce final consonant clusters, so that words ending in two consonants (left hand) are often pronounced as if there is only one (lef han), or past tense -ed forms in certain contexts EG. Iced tea. • Initial dental consonants (think, that) are frequently pronounced as alveolar stops (tink, dat), • Morphological features, such as possessive -’s (John’s girlfriend) and third person singular -s (she loves him), are not generally used. • In aspects of grammar AAVE and other vernaculars are considered as being “illogical”. • They use double negative construction. Eg: “He don’t know nothing ” or ”I ain’t afraid of no ghosts”. • There is a frequent absence of forms of the verb “to be”. Eg: You crazy or She workin now. • To talk about a habitual action that started or happened in the past, AAVE uses bin (typically stressed), not was, as in She bin workin there. • The negative forms are used with don’t (not doesn’t) Yet, the groups who use those dialects are not only distinguished by the language they use, but by more general factors such as beliefs and assumptions about the world and their experience of it. This is usually discussed in terms of “culture”. SOUNDS GRAMMAR
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   The Studyof Language. Yule, G. Cambridge University Press. Fourth Edition, 2010 BIBLIOGRAPHY