LST6282

UNIT
REVIEW
Example

• Language must be explained as expressing

meanings that are created within a grammar
system.

• Language must be explained as expressing

meanings that are created within a social system.
Review session 1
1. Sociolinguistics studies language as the most significant resource for making meaning by human
beings.
2. Biological factors influence the language people chose to use:
3. The participants - who is speaking and to whom.
4. The setting – how they are speaking.
5. The topic – what is being talked about.
6. The function – what they are speaking about.

7. The social uses of language can be explored using four dimensions which influence language
choice:
8. The solidarity-distance scale emphasises how power influences language choice.
9. The status scale indicates the effect of feelings on language choice.
10. The formality scale looks at how the setting or interaction influence language choice.
11. The referential scale indicate how language can convey subjective information
12. The affective scale looks at how we use language to express our feelings about something.
Review session 2

1. Typical interactions in particular domains explain language choice in most speech communities.
2. The standard is an uncodified spoken variety of a language that serves L functions.
3. Colloquial languages are codified, serve H functions, have developed from a dialect.
4. All speakers of a language are speakers of a dialect.
5. A creole is a particular dialect which, through some accident of history, has achieved a higher
status.
6. Isoglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which there is a very divergent superposed H
variety that is not spoken.
7. A lingua franca is a language used for communication between people whose first languages differ.
8. Creoles are real languages, but which have no native speakers.
9. A pidgin is a creole which has acquired native speakers.
10.Sociolinguistics shows us that variation is the norm, and the norm is stable and never changes.
 Review Session 3

1. The key social attributes affecting language use are money, social media, social networks, gender, ethnicity,
and age.
2. Gender is a biological category which dictates the specific social roles which are typically ascribed to women
and men in society and associated with female and male behaviours.
3. Most language use is influenced by the status of men and women in a society as a whole and there are many
discriminatory and negative attitudes towards women embedded in societal attitudes to language.
4. If a society is non-hierarchical, gender exclusive linguistic differences will be one dimension of more extensive
differences that reflect the social hierarchy.
5. Gender preferential linguistic differences are more common in island societies wherein the speech styles of
women and men vary in the frequencies with which they use particular linguistic features - e.g – h dropping
6. Men are more likely to use new advanced forms of language – they are language innovators and initiators of
language change.
7. Change from above denotes linguistic change in a speech community above the level of a speaker’s conscious
awareness. That is, speakers are not consciously aware of an ongoing change and they can comment on this
linguistic innovation.
8. Change from below denotes linguistic change in a speech community below the level of a speaker’s conscious
awareness. In this case speakers are consciously aware of a linguistic change in progress in a community.
 Review Session 4
1. All languages change over time, and this affects some aspects of language use.

2. These changes occur through language maintenance, social differentiation, and natural processes in usage. What are the teaching
implications of this?

3. Time and money make languages diverge in a manner similar to the evolution of organisms.

4. A proto-language is a reconstructed language from which known languages have descended by evolution. What can we call this?
5. Invasion and religion changes and creates languages.
6. The English language began during the 5 th Century AD/CE.
7. English vocabulary derived from Greek, French and Germanic languages.
8. Modern Vietnamese is a combination of Cambodian and Chinese.
9. Mon-Khymer belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language tree and has similar roots as Khmer.
10. People may adopt new speech features, especially slang, from lower social groups unconsciously.
11. Changes in the pronunciation of vowels are often ‘changes from below’ , in that they are changes below people’s level of conscious
awareness:
1. Post-vocalic [r] in New York English
2. [f]-fronting in British English
3. [t] glottalization [?]
12. Words also change their use/meaning over time. Semantic change is the evolution of word usage. Change in meaning entirely is
known as style shifting.
 Review Session 5
1. Register is the range of variation within the language use of an individual speaker influenced by changes in
situational factors like the addressee, setting, task or topic.
2. People’s hairstyles index aspects of their identity such as their ethnicity, age, gender, and social background.
3. Style is a linguistic outcome of a particular social situation.
4. Registers have particular characteristics and enable precise and efficient communication between people who share
experience, knowledge and skills.
5. Speech functions can be the same, but the style or register can be very different depending on the speakers and
setting.
6. Accommodation is when someone goes beyond their usual ways of speaking and behaving and engages in a ‘high’
or ‘strong’ performance often as a performance or for comedic effect or to assert power. E.g AAVE – British teens.
7. Stylisation is the process of shifting from one linguistic code to another. People code-switch for many reasons
including to shape and maintain a sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a larger community.
8. Code-switching is the adapting a speech style to decrease social distance by using forms that are similar to those
used by the person we are talking to. People accommodate to join a community and adopt the identity of the group.
9. People may accommodate their speech downwards towards the speech style of their addressees or diverge speech
upwards.
Review session 6
1. Sociolinguistic competence is a core element of communicative competence.
2. Semantics is concerned with what is someone trying to do when they say something.
3. Interpreting meaning in interaction involves understanding sociolinguistic norms.
4. Norms of interaction are descriptions of how people should act tied to the shared values of the speech community. Kiss or shake
hands. Say bless you, or nothing.
5. Any utterance/sentence expresses only one function.
6. A speech act is a type of act that can be performed by speaker meaning that one is doing so, this was named a perlocutionary act
by Giles. This is sometimes called a performative. I beg you to stop chasing the cat!
7. An illlocutionary act refers to meaning in the traditional sense. A perlocutionary act is what we bring about or achieve by saying
something.
8. Austin classified illocutionary acts into:
9. Representatives (asssertives): Get the speaker to do something. I will put the cat was on the mat. (vow)
10.Directives: Get the addressee to do something: Put that cat on the mat. (order)
11.Commissives: Represent a state: The cat is sitting on the mat. (claim)
12.Expressives: Express mental state of speaker: I thank you for making the cat sit. (thanks)
13.Declaratives: Make the thing said happen: I beg you not to sit on the cat. (beg)
14.Understanding communicative events requires a lot of knowledge of the norms of the community who use that language.
Review Session 7
1. Conversation refers to stretches of spoken or written language beyond an utterance or a sentence.
2. To understand meaning in interaction, we need to learn the norms of talk among different social and
cultural groups.
3. This means going beyond pragmatic meaning to the relationship between the speakers and their
background knowledge.
4. Participants never know who should speak when and when a turn is over.
5. The rules of conversation are learned explicitly within a speech community or speech situation.
6. Austin’s pragmatic model of conversation is said to apply universally:
7. The maxim of quality requires the speaker to be truthful. Not to say anything that is untrue.
8. The maxim of relation or relevance requires the speaker’s contribution be as informative as one possibly
can, and give only relevant or related information.
9. The maxim of manner requires the speakers to bring only relevant information to the discussion, avoiding
information that is not required.
10. The maxim of quantity requires the speaker to be clear, brief, and orderly and to avoid obscurity of
expression and ambiguity.
11. Inference is one of the most salient pragmatic phenomena. The idea is not communicated directly but we
can infer more than is literally said.