Variation and change.pptx

Variation and change.pptx

• 1.
  Variation and Change Lecture-10 ByAmjad Gul Abro
• 2.
  What is Variationand Change?  Language variation and change is an integrated subfield of linguistics that includes dialectology (the study of regional variation in language), historical linguistics (the study of how languages change over time) and sociolinguistics (the study of social variation in language).  Variations in language are the changes between language and dialect. Internal and external factors can be the cause of language change.
• 3.
  Why do languageschange?  Reasons given by non –specialist.  Change in language is brought about under the influence of geography.  Change is brought due to change in internal anatomy.  Economic and political factors play their role  People are too lazy to use language properly.  Reasons given by linguistics.  Functional explanation
• 4.
   The individualand society play their part in language change.  The speech habits of one generation are based on the earlier one and change is likely to occur during the course of the acquisitions by others.  Rise of new concepts and discovery of new objects bring change in the vocabulary, structure and sounds of a language.  Geographical conditions also affect the change in sounds of a language.
• 5.
   Language changesbecause a huge migration takes place and a prestige is required, so language change is moulded to suits new trends.  There are usually five types of changes occur in a language.  Phonological  Morphological  Syntactical  Semantic  And lexical
• 6.
  Regional Variation  ,Regionalvariation is a major aspect of variation in language. Regional variation is geographically based and shows which part of the language area a person is from.  Many factors contribute to regional variation (see the section on Why do languages have dialects? below), but the main reason is the same why language families develop over time from one ancestor language: some speakers of a language start to communicate less with each other (due to geographical separation, for instance), and so any new features of speech they develop will not spread to those speakers that they do not communicate with, and this will make their speech different from that of others in the long run.  The first step in the divergence process is the development of regional dialects, which can grow into separate languages in time, if the separation continues and the number of features that differentiate the dialects grows.
• 7.
  Regional Variation  Averagepeople (non-linguists) are usually aware of regional differences to some extent. They are usually aware of other people’s dialect features, but not of their own: basically, everyone takes their own regional dialect to be “normal”, “featureless”, and the default way to speak.  People are often surprised when dialectologists want to study their speech, since they honestly think it is unremarkable, and the speech of other people (in the next village or town) is what should be studied since those who speak it really have “an accent”.
• 8.
  . The studyof regional variation  When linguists want to study regional variation, they collect data from a great range of places in the given language area, and about all subsystems of language: pronunciation, grammar, and the lexicon. Then they enter the results on maps, usually about one feature per map. The line that separates the occurrences of two variants of the same linguistic variable (basically, a linguistic feature that has variation) on a map is called an isogloss.
• 9.
  Why do languageshave dialects?  The basic social/historical idea about the reason for dialect differences, recognized by historical linguists before dialectology even existed, is that when speakers communicate more with some speakers of their language more than with others the slight changes that occur in people’s speech will not spread to those with whom the speakers in question do not communicate.  This, in time, gives rise to dialects of the language, and, given more time, to the development of related but separate languages.  What is it then that impedes communication between people? It is geographical boundaries, first, and various social boundaries second.
• 10.
  Linguistic variation  theterm linguistic variation (or simply variation) refers to regional, social, or contextual differences in the ways that a particular language is used.  Variation between languages, dialects, and speakers is known as inter-speaker variation. Variation within the language of a single speaker is called intra-speaker variation.  Since the rise of sociolinguistics in the 1960s, interest in linguistic variation (also called linguistic variability) has developed rapidly.  R.L. Trask notes that "variation, far from being peripheral and inconsequential, is a vital part of ordinary linguistic behavior" (Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics, 2007).  The formal study of variation is known as variationist (socio)linguistics.  All aspects of language including phonemes, morphemes, syntactic structures
• 11.
  Linguistic variation  "Linguisticvariation is central to the study of language use. In fact it is impossible to study the language forms used in natural texts without being confronted with the issue of linguistic variability.  Variability is inherent in human language: a single speaker will use different linguistic forms on different occasions, and different speakers of a language will express the same meanings using different forms.  Most of this variation is highly systematic: speakers of a language make choices in pronunciation, morphology, word choice, and grammar depending on a number of non-linguistic factors.  These factors include the speaker's purpose in communication, the relationship between speaker and hearer, the production circumstances, and various demographic affiliations that a speaker can have." (Randi Reppen et al., Using Corpora to Explore Linguistic Variation. John Benjamins, 2002).
• 12.
  Linguistic Variation and SociolinguisticVariation  "There are two types of language variation:  Linguistic and Sociolinguistic.  With linguistic variation, the alternation between elements is categorically constrained by the linguistic context in which they occur.  With sociolinguistic variation, speakers can choose between elements in the same linguistic context and, hence the alternation is probabilistic.  Furthermore, the probability of one form being chosen over another is also affected in a probabilistic way by a range of extra-linguistic factors [e.g. the degree of (in)formality of the topic under discussion, the social status of the speaker and of the interlocutor, the setting in which communication takes place, etc.]"
• 13.
  Dialectal Variation  "A dialectis variation in grammar and vocabulary in addition to sound variations. For example, if one person utters the sentence 'John is a farmer' and another says the same thing except pronounces the word farmer as 'fahmuh,' then the difference is one of accent.  But if one person says something like 'You should not do that' and another says 'Ya hadn't oughta do that,' then this is a dialect difference because the variation is greater.  The extent of dialect differences is a continuum. Some dialects are extremely different and others less so."
• 14.
  Types of Variation "[R]egionalvariation is only one of many possible types of differences among speakers of the same language. For example, there are occupational dialects (the word bugs means something quite different to a computer programmer and an exterminator), sexual dialects (women are far more likely than men to call a new house adorable), and educational dialects (the more education people have, the less likely they are to use double negatives). There are dialects of age (teenagers have their own slang, and even the phonology of older speakers is likely to differ from that of young speakers in the same geographical region) and dialects of social context (we do not talk the same way to our intimate friends as we do to new acquaintances, to the paperboy, or to our employer). . . . [R]egional dialects are only one of many types of linguistic variation."