Steven Pinker: What our language habits reveal

Link to Steven Pinker's talk on 'What our language habits reveal'

THINGS TO INCLUDE IN CLA EXAM RESPONSE

PHONOLOGY
-Deletion of a final consonant
-Consonant cluster reduction
-Deletion of unstressed syllable
-Substitution
-Redublication of sounds
-Assimilation
-Use of intonation or stress for meaning and understanding of intonation
-Addition of sound to facilitate CVCV pattern

LEXIS/SEMANTICS
-Quantity of words produced/understood
-Concrete/abstract - hypothetical meaning, references to time, past, present, future.
-Overextension - categorical, analogical, statement
-Making new words - compounding, conversion, suffixes and prefixes
-Kinds of words - social, labelling, actions, modifying
-Attributes of objects - hot, cold, big, small.
-Meaning relations - put/give/take.
-Semantic field

GRAMMAR
-One word, two word, telegraphic, post telegraphic, holophrases
-Verb tense forms. Auxillary verbs.
-Asking questions - intonation, question words, inversion of subject and verb, use of auxillaries
-Negative forms - No at the beginning or end, no in the middle
-Tag questions
-Aquisiton of inflections
-Over generalisation
-Correction of irregular forms.
-Plurals

PRAGMATICS
-Conversational functions of language
-Indirect requests
-Speech interaction
-Conventions (turn taking etc)

THEORISTS
-Halliday (instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginitive, representational)
-Skinner (Nurture)
-Chomsky  (Nature, LAD)
-Piaget

LANGUAGE CHANGE EXAM GOLD

APOSTROPHE NOW: Bad grammar and the people who hate it

TERMINOLOGY LANGUAGE CHANGE

PEJORATION
When  words increasingly acquire negative meanings; gay now means homosexual, opposed to happy.

DIALECT LEVELLING
The belief that language is becoming standardized - decrease in dialect differences.

PRESCRIPTIVISM
The study of language with the intention of controlling it - by dictating rules of usage. Samuel Johnson published the first dictionary in 1755.
  
JARGON
Technical language or highly field-specific vocabulary.

AMELIORATION
A process in which words become more socially acceptable e.g. spastic, pretty.

ETYMOLOGICAL FALLACY
The mistaken belief that earliest historical meaning of a word is it's only true meaning. The word hound originally simply meant "dog" in general. This usage is now archaic or poetic only, and hound now almost exclusively refers to dogs bred for hunting in particular.

'The Great Vowel Shift'
Caused the phonological changes in pronouncing lexis like team to time.

BIDLIALECTALISM
The ability to use two dialects of the same language.

PRINTING PRESS
Intorduced by William Caxton in 1476


ACCOMODATION THEORY (Howard Giles)
 suggests people adjust their body language and accent/speech according to the person they are addressing.

SAPIR WHORF HYPOTHESIS
The idea that language controls or determines the way we think; "A hypothesis holding that the structure of a language affects the perceptions of reality of its speakers and thus influences their thought patterns and worldviews."

Funny clip of attempt of English Accent

French man learning to speak in English accent

CLA Notes Further Research

• Children’s ability to pronounce words and to use the English sound system develops much slower than comprehension: a one-year-old child, for example, can recognise perhaps 50 words but pronounce only about 3 consonants and a vowel.
•  Children’s acquisition of phonology is gradual and occurs step by step:  they start with a restricted set of words and gradually increase their repertoire, just as they start with one-word utterances and slowly build up longer sentences.   
• One feature of child language aquisition is that children master language by making mistakes until they fully aquire the skills.
• REDUBLICATION - something which caregivers often hear around the second year. Turning words like 'water', 'bottle' and 'window' into WO-WO, BO-BO and MU-MU. CRYSTAL ssuggests that the repetition and simplified pronunciation in these words helps children to recognise and learn bit by bit.
•  CONSONANT CLUSTERS - caregivers notice around the age of four. When children fail to speak words with several consonants next to each other. 
•  INTONATION - one of the first strategies to be used to make up for a lack of grammar. children of about 12 months quickly pick up the formal patterns of intonation (e.g rising intonation to form a question). However it still take until the early teens to grasp all the meanings behind these patterns. SHOWN BY ALLAN CRUTTENDEN who found that adults could judge how voice affects meaning whereas seven year olds were hardly able to do this at all. Intonation is important because it gives a listener clues to the meanings of a speaker’s message.
•  MISMATCH - choosing an unrelated meaning (labelling a phone as a tractor)
•  SEMANTIC ERRORS show that children do not learn a word complete with meaning (as we might when learning a different language) but actively negotiate it's usage through trail, error and observation.
   

CLA Terminology