Planet Word Lesson Notes

Children learn to speak around the age of 2.
Dad/Mum usually a childs first words.

Forbidden Experiment: Victor
-Caught (feral) and taken to Paris having never experienced society.
-Couldn't speak.
-Never learned to speak (died age 42).
-Victor is evidence of the C.A.P (critical acquisition period).

Prof Steven Pinker
-Children associate lexis with context.
-Children play with language in order to hone language skills.

Jean Berko-Gleeson: The 'Wug' Test 1958
-Supports Chompskys L.A.D
-Children add 's' to words to pluralise etc.

Learning language needs to be a natural process.
Language defines our identity.

Child Language Skills
-Create individual phonemes and phonetics.
-To use and understand a vocabulary of words.
-Use of prosodic features such as pitch, loudness, speed & intonation to convey meaning.
-Structure interactions with others.
-Subtleties of language such as politeness, implication and irony.

Brief Language in Gender Lesson Notes

Grices Maxims:
Quantity: Be as informative as you possibly can and give as much information as needed, and no more.
Quality: Be truthful and don't give information that is false or that isn't supported by evidence.
Relation: Be relevant and say things that are relevant to the conversation.
Manner: Be clear, brief and orderly as you can and avoid obscurity and ambiguity.

3 D's
Deficit
Dominance
Difference

2 C's
Cooperation
Competition

Men tend to me less polite, use more colloquial language, slang and swear words.

Women tend to use tag questions more frequently and are likely to 'step down' more in conversations with men.

Brief Power in Language Lesson Notes (11/9/14)

Instrumental Power:
Power behind discourse. Power in language coming from high social/professional status. For example, the power a teacher has over their pupils.

Influential Power:
Power in discourse. Power asserted through language used. For example, the use of synthetic personalisation in advertisements.

All power in language depends on the context.

Parents have instrumental power over their children however, depending on context, may be more likely to use influential power.

When disciplining their children parents will be more inclined to use imperative syntax "don't do that".

Game of Thrones Power Analysis (AS work, unfinished)

The text shows straight away that the convesation between the two characters is an unequal encounter by using the line "The cords in the king's neck stood out sharp as swords". This shows that 'Stannis' (The King) has instrumental power due to his position, making the conversation an unequal encounter.

The idea that this conversation is an unequal encounter is reinforced when 'Snow' says "I have a name, Your Grace". Snow calling Stannis 'Your Grace' shows that he respects Stannis' powerful position of King however the line 'I have a name' shows that Snow is not willing to let Stannis have all power over him by telling him to call him by his name.

Stannis shows he does not like this retort from Snow by saying "Snow, was ever a name more ill-omened?" then aslmost threatens Snow by touching his sword hilt. This shows Snow that Stannis is not willing to take his retorts and returns full power in the conversation to Stannis.

Horizon

"Language defines us as humans"
Language = ability to transmit thoughts
Babies pick up language with minimal effort
Nature vs Nurture
How we learn to speak is still a mystery

Deb Roy - Cognitive psychologist -> turns house into 24 hour surveillance of his baby "speech-home project".
Captured every moment from birth - 3 years old
Babbles - one word - two words - more complex

Talk to children in positive ways "positive reinforcement"
Parents simplify their speech -> elongate gaps between words
Convergence: adapting language to audience
"Parentese"
At first phonological awareness outdoes semantic awareness
By the time a child is 5 they'll know ~5000 words
As they grow up they learn 3000 words a year
When a child doesn't know a noun they'll use determiners eg. "that's a" "that one"
Voicebox low down in the throat of humans giving us the ability to make a variety of noises
All points towards being born with the ability to pickup and use language without being taught

Noam Chomsky:
Forbidden Experiment = isolated baby
Noam Chomskys "L.A.D" language acquisition device

Analysis of Power in Language (David Cameron Scottish Independence Speech Text)

The first obvious point about the speech and the speaker is an underlying theme of political power. This is obvious due to the fact that the Prime Minister, David Cameron is the speaker and therefore obviously carries a large amount of political power (due to him being a ‘powerful participant’). However, David Camerons’ speech about a matter that he clearly feels strongly about (Scotlands’ Independence) is not political propaganda using his powerful status to influence the Scottish vote but more of a ‘heartfelt’ speech about why he personally doesn’t think Scotland should vote for a divorce in the long standing United Kingdom.

Cameron shows a lot of influential power in this speech down to the fact that he doesn’t try to use his political power to enforce authority and tell Scotland that they shouldn’t break up the UK because ‘he says so’ etc. but instead he talks about the benefits of the UK staying together and the heritage & history of the UK in a speech in which he is trying to influence the Scottish vote towards, what he believes, is the right decision.

Due to this text being a persuasive speech there is many a persuasive & power assertive technique being used and one of the most immediately obvious ones is the repeated use of personal pronouns such as “we” and “us”. This language technique implicates a lot of power in this speech in particular because of the subject of the speech. This speech is about the potential that Scotland now have to break free from the United Kingdom and by using personal pronouns like David Cameron does in this speech he is creating a sense of togetherness. This asserts a lot of power in the speech because Cameron uses his political power to try and bring together two countries that are on the verge of divorce and only a man with power could do such a thing via one speech and this technique combined with David Camerons’ reasons for the UK staying intact asserts a lot of power.

In my opinion David Cameron does a very good job of asserting power in a laid back and open way via this speech instead of just working on his political power to demand a change in mind of the Scottish citizens.


http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/02/david-camerons-speech-on-scottish-independence-full-text-and-audio/

Text Talk Review

Texting has been a huge part of human communication since not long after the SMS was invented however it gets a lot of stick (mostly form the older generation’ about its apparent ‘killing’ of the English language; being described as “snot-talk” & “Unimaginative, bleak, bald, sad shorthand drab shrinktalk” according to John Sutherland. It has also been mentioned that it is “doing to our language as Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago” by John Humphrys.

This is not the only criticism of text talk however, as most text talk is blamed on teenagers, being called “SMS vandals” by John Humphrys. However, text talk is not disliked by all; in fact it is very popular. The connotations between teenagers and text talk is untrue however, as certain abbreviations were added to the Oxford English Dictionary almost 200 years ago. ‘Cos’ the abbreviation of ‘because’ was added in 1828 and ‘wot’ from 1829. David Crystal mentions that “Many [abbreviations] can be found in literary dialect representations, such as by Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, DH Lawrence, or Alan Bleasdale ("Gissa job!")”. To me, this shows that if literary legends could use a primitive sort of ‘text talk’ in their writing then it is definitely not ‘killing’ the English language. Personally I can argue against the accusation of teenager ruining the English language as I personally, at 16 years old, text with barely any text talk apart from the odd missed capital or punctuation.

David Crystals’ “2B or not 2B?” from July 2008 presents the idea of text talk from a neutral perspective which sheds the true light of how text talk has been going on for years and it is not just an aggressive assault on the standard English language created by those troublesome teens. It shows that even when messages were sent via telegraph people ‘double-decked’ words such as MumDad or ComeQuick as the writers of messages were charged per word. It even points out that Anglo-Saxon scribes used quicker ways to write (although not quite text talk) such as '&' instead of 'and'.

Personally I think the accusations that text talk devised by teenagers is killing the English language and I argue that the English language is infinitely changing and adaptable, the world (including the Oxford English Dictionary) is just keeping up with the times. You should too.