Language and Society
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Why Is Language Typology Possible?
Why is language typology possible? Martin Haspelmath 1 Languages are incomparable Each language has its own system. Each language has its own categories. Each language is a world of its own. 2 Or are all languages like Latin? nominative the book genitive of the book dative to the book accusative the book ablative from the book 3 Or are all languages like English? 4 How could languages be compared? If languages are so different: What could be possible tertia comparationis (= entities that are identical across comparanda and thus permit comparison)? 5 Three approaches • Indeed, language typology is impossible (non- aprioristic structuralism) • Typology is possible based on cross-linguistic categories (aprioristic generativism) • Typology is possible without cross-linguistic categories (non-aprioristic typology) 6 Non-aprioristic structuralism: Franz Boas (1858-1942) The categories chosen for description in the Handbook “depend entirely on the inner form of each language...” Boas, Franz. 1911. Introduction to The Handbook of American Indian Languages. 7 Non-aprioristic structuralism: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) “dans la langue il n’y a que des différences...” (In a language there are only differences) i.e. all categories are determined by the ways in which they differ from other categories, and each language has different ways of cutting up the sound space and the meaning space de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1915. Cours de linguistique générale. 8 Example: Datives across languages cf. Haspelmath, Martin. 2003. The geometry of grammatical meaning: semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison 9 Example: Datives across languages 10 Example: Datives across languages 11 Non-aprioristic structuralism: Peter H. Matthews (University of Cambridge) Matthews 1997:199: "To ask whether a language 'has' some category is...to ask a fairly sophisticated question.. -
Syntactic Variations of African-American Vernacular English (Aave) Employed by the Main Character in Hustle & Flow
SYNTACTIC VARIATIONS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH (AAVE) EMPLOYED BY THE MAIN CHARACTER IN HUSTLE & FLOW A THESIS Presented as a Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Attainment of a Sarjana Sastra Degree in English Language & Literature By: DESTYANA PRASTITASARI 07211144026 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDY PROGRAM ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMENT FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND ARTS YOGYAKARTA STATE UNIVERSITY 2013 MOTTOS Stay focus, work very hard, and do your best. (Farah Quinn) There’s no reason to say ‘I cannot do it’ because ‘I can do it’ I can get the tired and desperate feelings but they cannot occur in more than 24 hours Always smile, greet for everyone, and everything gonna be alright (Mottos of my life) Everybody gotta have a dream (Hustle & Flow) v DEDICATIONS I dedicate this thesis to: My beloved mama (Mrs.Bingartin), My papa (Mr.Sumarno) who always give me love , pray, support and deep understanding, My beloved sweetheart, who always gives me spirit and patience, and My younger brother Ardhi ‘Hwang Kichu’ who always supports and accompanies me in writing this thesis. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Alhamdulillah, all praise be to Allah SWT, the Almighty, the Most Gracious and the Most Merciful, without which I would never have finished this thesis. In accomplishing this thesis, I owe to many people for the support, guidance, assistance, and help. I would like to express my deepest gratitude and thanks to RA Rahmi Dipayanti Andayani, M.Pd., my first consultant and Titik Sudartinah, M.A., my second consultant, for their endless support, advice, patience and great guidance in helping me throughout this thesis. -
Manual for Language Test Development and Examining
Manual for Language Test Development and Examining For use with the CEFR Produced by ALTE on behalf of the Language Policy Division, Council of Europe © Council of Europe, April 2011 The opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Council of Europe. All correspondence concerning this publication or the reproduction or translation of all or part of the document should be addressed to the Director of Education and Languages of the Council of Europe (Language Policy Division) (F-67075 Strasbourg Cedex or [email protected]). The reproduction of extracts is authorised, except for commercial purposes, on condition that the source is quoted. Manual for Language Test Development and Examining For use with the CEFR Produced by ALTE on behalf of the Language Policy Division, Council of Europe Language Policy Division Council of Europe (Strasbourg) www.coe.int/lang Contents Foreword 5 3.4.2 Piloting, pretesting and trialling 30 Introduction 6 3.4.3 Review of items 31 1 Fundamental considerations 10 3.5 Constructing tests 32 1.1 How to define language proficiency 10 3.6 Key questions 32 1.1.1 Models of language use and competence 10 3.7 Further reading 33 1.1.2 The CEFR model of language use 10 4 Delivering tests 34 1.1.3 Operationalising the model 12 4.1 Aims of delivering tests 34 1.1.4 The Common Reference Levels of the CEFR 12 4.2 The process of delivering tests 34 1.2 Validity 14 4.2.1 Arranging venues 34 1.2.1 What is validity? 14 4.2.2 Registering test takers 35 1.2.2 Validity -
1 Meeting of the Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals January 10
Meeting of the Committee of Editors of Linguistics Journals January 10, 2016 Washington, DC Present: Eric Baković, Greg Carlson, Abby Cohn, Elizabeth Cowper, Kai von Fintel, Brian Joseph, Tom Purnell, Johan Rooryck (via Skype) 1. Unified Stylesheet v2.0 Kai von Fintel discussed his involvement in a working group aiming to “update, revise, amend, precisify” the existing Unified Stylesheet for Linguistics Journals. An email from von Fintel on this topic sent to the editors’ mailing list shortly after our meeting is copied at the end of these minutes. Abby Cohn noted that Laboratory Phonology will continue to use APA style given its close contact with relevant fields that use also this style. It was also noted and agreed that authors should be encouraged to ensure the stability of online works for citation purposes. 2. LingOA Johan Rooryck reported on the very recent transition of subscription Lingua (Elsevier) to open access Glossa (Ubiquity Press), and addressed questions about a document he sent to the editors’ mailing list in November (also appended at the end of these minutes). The document invites the editorial teams of other subscription journals in linguistics and related fields to make the move to fair open access, as defined by LingOA (http://lingoa.eu), to join Glossa as well as Laboratory Phonology and Journal of Portuguese Linguistics. On January 9, David Barner (Psychology & Linguistics, UC San Diego) and Jesse Snedeker (Psychology, Harvard) called for fair open access at Cognition, another Elsevier journal. (See http://meaningseeds.com/2016/01/09/fair- open-access-at-cognition/.) The transition of Lingua to Glossa has apparently gone even smoother than expected. -
Social Dimensions of Language Change
Social dimensions of language change Lev Michael 1 Introduction Language change results from the differential propagation of linguistic vari- ants distributed among the linguistic repertoires of communicatively inter- acting individuals in a given community. From this it follows that language change is socially-mediated in two important ways. First, since language change is a social-epidemiological process that takes place by propagating some aspect of communicative practice across a socially-structured network, the organization of the social group in question can affect how a variant propagates. It is known, for example, that densely connected social net- works tend to be resistant to innovations, where as more sparsely connected ones are more open to them. Second, social and cultural factors, such as lan- guage ideologies, can encourage the propagation of particular variants at the expense of others in particular contexts, likewise contributing to language change. The purpose of this chapter is to survey our current understanding of the social factors that affect the emergence and propagation of linguistic variants, and thus language change, by bringing together insights from vari- ationist sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, social psychology, and evolutionary approaches to language change. It is im- portant to note that there are, as discussed in Chapter 1, important factors beyond the social ones discussed in this chapter that affect variant propaga- 1 tion and language change, including factors related to linguistic production and perception, and cognitive factors attributable to the human language faculty (see Chapter 1). 1.1 Theorizing variation and language change As Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968) originally observed, theories of lan- guage that assume linguistic variation to be noise or meaningless divergence from some ideal synchronically homogeneous linguistic state { to be elim- inated by `averaging' or `abstraction' { encounter profound difficulties in accounting for language change. -
The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change
Language Variation and Change, 2 (1990), 205-254. Printed in the U.S.A. © 1991 Cambridge University Press 0954-3945/91 $5.00 + .00 The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change WILLIAM LABOV University of Pennsylvania ABSTRACT Two general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous socio- linguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in lin- guistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of lin- guistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is in- dependent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction de- velops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an ini- tial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-domi- nated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group. SOME BASIC FINDINGS AND SOME BASIC PROBLEMS Among the clearest and most consistent results of sociolinguistic research in the speech community are the findings concerning the linguistic differenti- ation of men and women. -
Modeling Language Variation and Universals: a Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing
Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing Edoardo Ponti, Helen O ’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulic, Roi Reichart, Thierry Poibeau, Ekaterina Shutova, Anna Korhonen To cite this version: Edoardo Ponti, Helen O ’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulic, Roi Reichart, et al.. Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing. 2018. hal-01856176 HAL Id: hal-01856176 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01856176 Preprint submitted on 9 Aug 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing Edoardo Maria Ponti∗ Helen O’Horan∗∗ LTL, University of Cambridge LTL, University of Cambridge Yevgeni Berzaky Ivan Vuli´cz Department of Brain and Cognitive LTL, University of Cambridge Sciences, MIT Roi Reichart§ Thierry Poibeau# Faculty of Industrial Engineering and LATTICE Lab, CNRS and ENS/PSL and Management, Technion - IIT Univ. Sorbonne nouvelle/USPC Ekaterina Shutova** Anna Korhonenyy ILLC, University of Amsterdam LTL, University of Cambridge Understanding cross-lingual variation is essential for the development of effective multilingual natural language processing (NLP) applications. -
Glossary for Language in the City
Glossary for Language in the City accent 1) Strictly speaking this refers to the pronunciation of a dialect, i.e. it is a reference to the collection of phonetic features which allow a speaker to be identified regionally or socially. It is frequently used to indicate that a given speaker does not speak the standard form of a language. The term is used in German to refer to grammatical features as well. 2) The stress placed on a syllable of a word or the type of stress used by a language (pressure or pitch). (German: Akzent, Aussprache) accommodation A phenomenon in the use of language whereby speakers tend to adopt features of their interlocutors, perhaps in an effort to make them feel at ease or to be socially accepted by them. If this happens on a broad front in a speech community then it can lead to language change. (German: Akkommodation) address system The set of rules which specify what forms are appropriate when speaking to others in a certain social context; usually the rules are for pronominal usage. In most European languages (except English and Irish) there is a twofold system with one set of pronouns used for familiar address (du, dich, dein, etc.) and one for formal address (Sie, Ihr, etc.). The range of each set differs among groups in any given society and among different countries but in general the former correlates with first names and the second with surnames though cross combinations are possible. See T-form and V-form. (German: Anredesystem) argot Linguistic features, mostly vocabulary, used by a certain group in society, usually secretive. -
TOWARDS a SOCIOLOGY of CURIOSITY Theoretical and Empirical Consideration of the Epistemic Drive Notion
TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF CURIOSITY Theoretical and Empirical Consideration of the Epistemic Drive Notion by Ariel Bineth Supervisor: Dr. Jean-Louis Fabiani Second Reader: Dr. Alexandra Kowalski A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology Central European University In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Arts Budapest, Hungary June 2020 i ABSTRACT Curiosity has long been a taken for granted concept in the popular imagination and a marginalized topic in academic discourse, especially in the field of sociology. However, studies in history and philosophy bring key reasons for developing an explicitly sociological treatment of the concept. This thesis provides an argument for the social production of curiosity. On the strength of its motivating characteristic, the essay reformulates curiosity as an epistemic drive in society which organizes the social production of knowledge under given socio-historical and local-cultural circumstances. In the first part of the thesis, historical, philosophical, and sociological literature is reviewed to address common preconceptions of curiosity and give a context for the argument. Then a theoretical apparatus is developed considering the emergence, development, and impact of epistemic drives which serves as a foundation for a new perspective on what motivates the social production of knowledge. The second part of the thesis focuses on the empirical applicability of the epistemic drive notion of curiosity. As a case study, the problem of economic incentives in scientific research is considered. After presenting data on global climate change investments and U.S. federal research funding, the proposition is formed that economic incentives put research projects with short-term profitability at a significant advantage in acquiring funding compared to projects with little to none immediate economic return. -
Language Variation and Ethnicity in a Multicultural East London Secondary School
Language Variation and Ethnicity in a Multicultural East London Secondary School Shivonne Marie Gates Queen Mary, University of London April 2019 Abstract Multicultural London English (MLE) has been described as a new multiethnolect borne out of indirect language contact among ethnically-diverse adolescent friendship groups (Cheshire et al. 2011). Evidence of ethnic stratification was also found: for example, “non-Anglo” boys were more likely to use innovative MLE diphthong variants than other (male and female) participants. However, the data analysed by Cheshire and colleagues has limited ethnographic information and as such the role that ethnicity plays in language change and variation in London remains unclear. This is not dissimilar to other work on multiethnolects, which presents an orientation to a multiethnic identity as more salient than different ethnic identities (e.g. Freywald et al. 2011). This thesis therefore examines language variation in a different MLE-speaking adolescent community to shed light on the dynamics of ethnicity in a multicultural context. Data were gathered through a 12-month ethnography of a Year Ten (14-15 years old) cohort at Riverton, a multi-ethnic secondary school in Newham, East London, and include field notes and interviews with 27 students (19 girls, 8 boys). A full multivariate analysis of the face and price vowels alongside a quantitative description of individual linguistic repertoires sheds light on MLE’s status as the new London vernacular. Building on the findings of Cheshire et al. (2011), the present study suggests that language variation by ethnicity can have social meaning in multi-ethnic communities. There are apparent ethnolinguistic repertoires: ethnic minority boys use more advanced vowel realisations alongside high rates of DH-stopping, and the more innovative was/were levelling system. -
A Literature Review on Code-Switching
1 Code-switching as a Result of Language Acquisition: A Case Study of a 1.5 Generation Child from China1 Yalun Zhou, Ph.D.2 Michael Wei, Ph.D.3 Abstract Despite individual differences, all bilinguals share the ability to act in their native language, in their second language, and to switch back and forth between the two languages they know (Van Hell, 1998). Chinese is the largest Asian American ethnic group in the United States. Their use of code-switching is an increasingly important issue in understanding their language choice and language development. This study on code-switching between a 1.5 generation Chinese child and her parents will add perspectives on the growing literature of Chinese American families, their language interaction and language development. Introduction There are several definitions for code-switching. Gumperz (1982 b) defined code-switching as “the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems” (p. 59). The emphasis is on the two grammatical systems of one language, although most people refer to code-switching as the mixed use of 1 This paper was presented at the 2007 Annual Conference of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), Seattle, Washington. 2 Yalun Zhou, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Director of Chinese Minor Program, Dept. of Communication and Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, [email protected] 3 Michael Wei, Ph.D., Associate Professor, TESOL Program Director, School of Education, University of Missouri-Kansas City, [email protected] 2 languages. Milroy and Muysken (1995) stated that code-switching is “the alternative use by bilinguals of two or more languages in the same conversation” (p.7). -
Sociolinguistic Influence in the Use of English As a Second Language (ESL) Classroom: Seeing from OGO’S Perspective
ELSYA: Journal of English Language Studies Vol. 1, No. 1, February 2019 , pp. 28-32 Available online at: http://ojs.journal.unilak.ac.id/index.php/elsya Sociolinguistic Influence in the Use of English as a Second Language (ESL) Classroom: Seeing from OGO’s Perspective Lana Hasanah 1, Siska Pradina 2, Almira Hadita 3, and Wella Cisilya Putri 4 1,2,3 State High School 3, Pekanbaru, Indonesia 4 State High School 7, Pekanbaru, Indonesia [email protected] ARTICLE HISTORY ABSTRACT Received : 3 May 2019 This paper aims to provide a brief overview and review of the research conducted by Revised : 26 May 2019 Ofodu Graceful Onovughe (OGO) under the title Sociolinguistic Input and English as Accepted : 27 May 2019 Second Language Classrooms published by the Canadian Center for Science and Education. This article also intended to provide a brief review of the sociolinguistic KEYWORDS influences of the use of the second most significant language in the class. Using qualitative descriptive analysis, this study managed to see that OGO‘s research used survey within a Sociolinguistics population of all middle school students in the Akure Ondo Regional Government, Nigeria Perspective (N= 240 students). Of the five existing hypotheses, the findings revealed that parents‘ Parents’ Occupation occupation is a significant sociolinguistic influence on the use of English among middle Article Review school students, followed by gender, age, religion, and classes. This current paper English as a Second Language (ESL) evaluated how OGO‘s research is represented in his article. Results reveal the strengeths, weaknesses, and the flaws of the article. 1.