Sociolinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Stylistics quiz

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Sociolinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Stylistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of how language serves and is shaped by the social nature of human beings. In its broadest conception, sociolinguistics analyzes the many and diverse ways in which language and society entwine. This vast field of inquiry requires and combines insights from a number of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology.

Sociolinguistics examines the interplay of language and society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the key concept, applied to language itself and to its use. The basic premise of sociolinguistics is that language is variable and changing.  As a result, language is not homogeneous — not for the individual user and not within or among groups of speakers who use the same language.

By studying written records, sociolinguists also examine how language and society have interacted in the past. For example, they have tabulated the frequency of the singular pronoun thou and its replacement you in dated hand-written or printed documents and correlated changes in frequency with changes in class structure in 16th  and 17th  century England. This is historical sociolinguistics: the study of relationship between changes in society and changes in language over a period of time.

Neurolinguistics is a branch of linguistics dealing mainly with the biological basis of the relationship of the human language and brain. Although the very name of this science was coined relatively recently, the issues investigated by it were analyzed already in the nineteenth century. The first attempts to account for the parts of brain responsible for the ability to produce speech were made on the basis of unfortunate accidents in which people suffered some damage to head and brain, thus enabling scientists to exclude the damaged brain parts from linguistic investigations if the injured remained capable of language production.

Since that time on the basis of posthumous analysis of brains of people with some language dysfunctions it has been determined that the left hemisphere of the brain plays a major role in language comprehension and production, and especially some of its areas that are more or less above the left ear.

Neurolinguistics deals with various language disorders known as ‘aphasia’ which is impairment of language functions because of some brain damage leading to difficulties in either producing or understanding linguistic forms. There are different aphasias depending on the language impairment and the damaged part of brain. Thus Broca’s aphasia is characterized by a reduced amount of speech, slow pace of speaking and distorted articulation. Wernicke’s aphasia is characterized by quite fluent, yet incomprehensible speech and difficulties in finding appropriate words. Conduction aphasia is connected with damage to arcuate fasciculus and it is connected with mispronouncing words, disrupted rhythm, large number of hesitations and pauses.

Stylistics can be by and large described as the study of style of language usage in different contexts, either linguistic, or situational. Yet, it seems that due to the complex history and variety of investigated issues of this study it is difficult to state precisely what stylistics is, and to mark clear boundaries between it and other branches of linguistics which deal with text analysis.

What has been the primary interest of stylistics for years is the analysis of the type, fluctuation, or the reason for choosing a given style as in any language a single thought can be expressed in a number of ways depending on connotations, or desired result that the message is to produce. Therefore, stylistics is concerned with the examination of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological properties and discursive devices. It might seem that the same issues are investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case, however sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant on the social class, gender, age, etc, while stylistics is more interested in the significance of function that the style fulfills.

Moreover, stylistics examines oral and written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic linguistic properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the texts. Thus, it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to discourse analysis, in particular critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Owing to the fact that at the beginning of the development of this study the major part of the stylistic investigation was concerned with the analysis of literary texts it is sometimes called literary linguistics, or literary stylistics. Nowadays, however, linguists study various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as well as novels and advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the text types is discriminated and thought to be more important than others. In addition to that, in the recent years so called ‘media-discourses’ such as films, news reports, song lyrics and political speeches have all been within the scope of interest of stylistics.

Grammatical Cases Quiz

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Charles Fillmore: Grammatical Cases

  Charles Fillmore was one of the first linguists to introduce a representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.

      Linguistic knowledge is organized around verbs or more precisely, a verb sense. (A verb may have more than one sense or meaning and these are represented separately. For example, to run for office is a different sense of run than to run to first base, and these would be two different representations in a case grammar.)

     Associated with each verb sense is a set of cases. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. A case is obligatory if the sentence would be ungrammatical if it were omitted. For example, John gave the book is ungrammatical.

     The cases associated with a verb seem to be associated with questions that we one would naturally ask about an event. Who did what to whom when? The representation seems well adapted to the retrieval of the information provided in a sentence. This feature was particularly appealing to psychologists and computational linguists

  A second interesting feature is that the same representation is provided to both the active and passive forms of the sentence. This feature would be consistent with a finding that we rarely recall the exact syntactic form of the sentence but do recall the basic information provided by the sentence.

     One of the consistent findings in human sentence understanding is that we seem to draw these inferences automatically. And, we rarely remember whether or not such information was explicitly stated in the sentence. This observation is consistent with some of the features of a frame-based representation as suggested by case structure grammar

     Another aspect of the case grammar representation is that it can be effectively used to parse incomplete or noisy sentences. For example, while John gave book is not grammatical, it is still possible to create an appropriate case grammar parse of this string of words. However, case grammar is not a particularly good representation for use in parsing sentences that involve complex syntactic constructions. 

Generative Grammar Activity

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Generative Grammar

Generative grammar is a notion that was developed in 1950s by Noam Chomsky. Although numerous scholars disagreed with Chomsky’s claims he gained many supporters and the idea was both developed and challenged at the same time. His works have exerted considerable influence onpsycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics as well as language methodology, and with time ‘generative grammar’ received broader meaning than it initially had.

Based partially on mathematical equations generative grammar is a set of rules that provide a framework for all the grammatically possible sentences in a language, excluding those which would be considered ungrammatical. A classical generative grammar consists of four elements:

A limited number of nonterminal signs;

A beginning sign which is contained in the limited number of nonterminal signs;

A limited number of terminal signs;

A finite set of rules which enable rewriting nonterminal signs as strings of terminal signs.

The rules could be applied in a free way and the only requirement is that the final result must be a grammatically correct sentence. What is more, generative grammar is recursive, which means that any output of application of rules can be the input for subsequent application of the same rule. That should enable generating sentences as the daughter ofthe father of the brother of his cousin.

Chomsky considered language to be a species-specific property which is a part of the human mind. Chomsky studied the ­Internal-language, a mental faculty for language. He also wanted to account for the linguistic competence of native speakers and the linguistic knowledge of language present in language users’ minds. As he argued:

People know which sentences are grammatically well formed in their native language

They have this knowledge also of previously unheard sentences

So they must rely on mentally represented rules and not only on memory

Generative grammars might be regarded as models of mentally represented rules

The ability to acquire such sets of rules is most probably uniquely human.

Moreover, Chomsky argued that people posses a kind of Language Faculty which is a part of human natural biological qualities. The innate linguistic knowledge that enables practically any child to learn any of about 6000 existing languages (at a given point in time) is sometimes known as theUniversal Grammar. This theory is often supported by the arguments that creole languages are created in a natural way and their users invent their own linguistic systems. What is more, it appears that creole languages share certain features even despite the distances that not allows for contact of two different creoles.

References:

Brown K. (Editor) 2005. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics – 2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier.

Wilson R. A. (Editor) 1999. The MIT encyclopedia of cognitive sciences. London: The MIT Press.

Triptic

Structuralism in America

Structural linguistics in America.
American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages. 
After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis. 

Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics. (see also Index: stimulus-response theory) 

Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks published during the 1950s. 

Glossary

Anomalist: an adherent of the view held by certain Greek grammarians of the 2d century B.C. that in language the connection between the word and the idea is arbitrary and based on convention alone

Circumlocution: the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea 

Clear-cut: showing distinct lucid analysis, plan, or presentation : having unmistakable clarity and definiteness

Counter-factual: contrary to fact

Deviation: departure from an established body of principles, a system of beliefs, an ideology, or a party line

Dismissed: permit or cause to leave 

Embodied: to make concrete by expression in perceptible form

Enterprise: a plan or design for a venture or undertaking

Feasible: possible of realization

Henceforth: from this point on

Hyponymy: a generic name not based on a recognizable species

Indigenous: of, relating to, or designed for natives

Introspection: the examination of one's own thought and feeling 

Jargon: confused unintelligible language

Jesting: to speak or act without seriousness or in a frivolous manner 

Mentalism:  a hypothesis that special factors of mind must be assumed to analyze, classify, or explain some or all phenomena of language 

Muffled:  to keep down

Neatly: in a smart manner

Ominous: indicative of future misfortune or calamity

Ongoing: the action of continued forward movement 

Onomatopoeia: formation of words in imitation of natural sounds

Overlay: to hide or obscure by or as if by superimposition 

Perennial: continuing or lasting for several years

Peripheral: located away from a center or central portion

Philology: study of literature that includes or may include grammar, criticism, literary history, language history, systems of writing, and anything else that is relevant to literature or to language as used in literature

Plausible: obtaining approbation or favor

Sememe: the meaning of a morpheme

Slang: to cast forcibly and usually suddenly

Syncategorematic: not capable of standing alone as a term in a proposition

Tagmemes: a constituent of a meaningful grammatical relation that cannot be analyzed into smaller meaningful features and that may be marked by features of word order, selection of allomorphs, agreement with finite verb forms, and elaboration by preceding adjectival modifiers

Taxeme: a minimum grammatical feature of selection, of order, of stress, of pitch, or of phonetic modification

Triad: a union or group of three especially of three closely related persons, beings, or things

Volitions: the acts of deciding               

                                         

How idiolect changes through an individual's life

Introduction

Since many years, there have been too many researches about language in a lot of different ways and categories as its acquisition, function, differences, etc.  But just few linguists have studied language in its very simple way: the language of an individual. All of us have our own way to communicate with others; it means that each individual has a different style than the others at the moment to express their ideas or feelings. This individual pattern of language is called idiolect.

Phenomena

We are going to see how the pattern of language of a simple individual starts to change through his age and the main factors that produce these changes (social class, community, socio-economic level, etc.) and why.

Hypothesis

Social class can be an important factor that we can use to determine how a person is going to use the language.  But we can’t forget that most of the people in all social contexts have the capacity to talk in a formal way when it is needed, so the more it is needed the more is going to be talked.

            According to that information it can be supposed that people who live, develop and interact in an environment who requires a formal way to speak are going to speak in that way most of time and some of the expressions or words are going to be part of their idiolect.  And the people who don’t need to use a formal language; because of their job, level of education, or simply because it is not needed in their everyday lives, have a language more informal that the other people.  So, if we supposed that middle and high class people have jobs in which is needed to talk in a formal way or that they receive an education where they had to learn it and use it, we can say that middle class people has a formal way to speak that people of a low socio-economic level that used the formal language very few because they don’t need it and because they hardly listen it.

Objectives

We are going to see this part of language that we listen and produce everyday in all our life and that we almost never pay it attention.

This work is going to explain, first at all, what is this thing called idiolect and how the society with all its elements, the social class and we as members of a community affect it and see if it is the age or the social class what determines the idiolect.

Contextual Framework

Different social groups use different linguistic varieties, and as experienced members of a speech community we have learnt to classify speakers accordingly” (Trudgill, 21).

So, we can distinguish some “barriers” that can help us to know the background of the person who is talking to us (Trudgill, 23-24).

These barriers can be sex, age, social class, ethnicity, style, etc. 

This informality is used in different level depending on the circumstances in which the participants are, like their social class; sex; age; if they are in the school, at home, with friends in a party; etc.  It means that when the formal or the informal use of language changes in a certain social context it changes also in all the others (Romaine, 96-97).

We can add other factor that is known as the social continuum intersection.  It means that when a pattern of speak is adopted by the lower class, it is, at the same time, adopted by all the population in general but only in their informal speech (Romaine, 96).

Theoretical Framework

Idiolect, according to the Merriam’s Webster dictionary, is the language or speech pattern of one individual at a particular period of life (616).

It could be in a very summarized way because there are more factors that can modify this “pattern” of language.  One of them can be the social environment in which the individual lives or in which the individual is in a specific moment.  For example, we do not talk as the same way when we talk with our friends as when we talk in a job’s interview.  Another is the social class, because is the way in which people speak what defines the social role and also, in many cases, the economic situation of the person who is speaking (Stubbs, 23).

So, we can say that an idiolect is the way in which one person speak by himself and that shows his or her own capabilities of language.  The ways of speech or the idiolect of a group of persons that live in the same community is called common languages.  These common languages are not made of a single idiolect, but at the relation and fusion of the idiolects of all the people of the community.  This is more explained by Noam Chomsky, who distinguishes two kinds of language: the E-language and the I-language.  The E-language was about the grammatical rules, sounds and the structure of the language in a functional way; and the I-language was a group of symbols and rules that generate an E-language (http://frege.brown.edu/heck/pdf/published/Idiolects.pdf). 

We can suppose from here that an idiolect is the simplest form of the language that at the same time helps to generate it.  In this chapter we are going to see deepest the factors that affect the idiolect of a person.

Conclusions

We can conclude that idiolect is the individual way in which a person speaks.  It is influenced by the environment in which the person is developing and it fits to the situation that the person is living at the moment.

Both, age and social environment are the two main factors that build the idiolect of each one of use, but is the last one what has the main role.  In spite of this, idiolect is more than a way of speaking, is the personal way that a person uses to communicate with all the people and it shows the personal style which that individual has and forms part of his or her personality, something that can tell us a little bit more about someone and that can help us to tell to the others who we are.

Anthropological Linguistics Quiz

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Anthropological Linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is more often considered to be a sub discipline of anthropology than linguistics and historically that is where it comes from. The primary concern of anthropologic linguistics was with the unwritten languages in America and their recording in order to preserve them in case the number of speakers started to decrease drastically. Moreover, the languages were seen as a vital part of culture so the knowledge of language was required to be able to completely understand the analyzed culture.

Anthropological linguistics deals with describing many languages and issues such as the influence of language on the behavior of the community that uses it. The well known Sapir-Whorf hypothesisis a result of such investigations. According to this theory the language that people use has strong influence on the perception of the world. Therefore, anthropolinguists deal with problems such as how it happens that peoples sharing a culture might speak different languages and peoples who have different cultures sometimes share a language.

Also finding a systematic way of putting down previously unwritten languages in a way that would reflect all linguistic peculiarities and phonetic phenomena is the task of anthropologic linguists. Such undertakings not only lead to preserving endangered languages, but are also important from the point of view of culture. To find appropriate way of writing in a language that has only been spoken linguists seek the phonetic patterns. It is also important to provide a way of symbolizing speech sounds in such a way as to enable the native speakers to read it in order to verify if the linguists’ assumptions are correct. When this task is accomplished the analysis of morphemes begins and later on also of syntax.

As anthropologic linguistics works on the assumption that communities’ cultures are reflected by language change it investigates synchronic and diachronic language change – that is it analyses various dialects and if it is possible the historical development. Moreover, the emergence and evolution of pidgins and creoles is also within the scope of interest of anthropologic linguistics. What is more, language acquisition in children is also studied by anthropolinguists, however, not the stages of language development are examined, but how the acquisition of linguistic abilities is perceived by the community. It turns out that in certain cultures parents do not interfere with the process, while in others caretakers put a lot of effort in teaching verbal etiquette.

Brown K. (Editor) 2005. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics – 2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier.