Grice's Pragmatics/discourse: maxims of conversation: Maxim of Quality: be truthful, only say that for which you have adequate evidence Maxim of Relevance: be relevant, be on topic. Assume people are going to be on topic Maxim of Quantity: saying more or less than you need to Maxim of Manner: avoid obscurity, avoid ambiguity; be brief, and be orderly Pragmatics concerns itself with the way society constrains our understanding of language Speech act: Assertion Question Request Order Promise Threat Performative speech act: don't describe something such as they do something. By saying them you make them true. Disembodied, action verbs Direct vs. indirect speech: part of why you would flout a maxim. Implicatures: things are being implied. Discourse: what we talk about and how; Discourse of gender (when your talking ABOUT things) Gendered discourse (something else, gendered is underlying) Discourse: come into the possession of a 3-6 year old child that has never had or heard of about Christmas. So we tell them things about it. What is Santa Claus, etc., what is Christ, Christmas trees, carols, stockings, presents. These are some of the discourses of Christmas. Even Christmas is a discourse. Santa Claus has a discourse of this naughty or nice thing. There is a religious discourse. Selfless discourse: singing carols and giving gifts to benefit others. Discourse of X vs. X(`ed) discourse: Discourse of X (talk about X) X (`ed) Discourse (using X to talk about Y) Selfless discourse: singing carols and giving gifts to benefit others. Sociolinguistics: the way language interacts in society. Words with restricted use (cussing). Dialects. Slang. How language changes over time: we now need words like blog and Wi-Fi. Sociolinguistics: variation in language General: sociolinguistic competence o Socially realistic: Starts with linguistic data and tries to describe society by this data. Phonetics is the most common or used or whatever cause is the easiest to pick out because you can hear the differences in the ways people speak and relate that to where they are from and where the grew up. Syntax: sentences are different in different places. Women and men sometimes speak differently. Ya'll is a morphological distinction.
Socially constituted: goes in other direction; aware of society, see the differences but do they show up linguistically. Speech of women and speech of men, and speech of 4th generation Mexicans here and newer ones. o Sociology/social-psychology of language: Traditional dialectology: based on word lists Isoglosses mapped: Look for differences, plot them on a map (isogloss-boundary between the differences) Bundles of isoglosses become dialect boundaries: Many coterminous lines of differences make up a dialect "boundary" or "border" (bundle of isoglosses) Problems of traditional dialectology: o Word lists o Brand names, specialized knowledge, shared media o NORMs (non-mobile, Older, Rural, Males) o No women, children, or "city folk" o Decline of "rural life" NORMS: (non-mobile, Older, Rural, Males) o No women, children, or "city folk" Rural vs. urban: city vs. country folk, if you live in the city you talk one way and if you live in the country you talk another. Rural life began to decline. William labov's variationist sociolinguistics: focus on grammar and pronounciation; Less "conscious" and susceptible to active manipulation Focus on "natural speech" (have to catch people when they are unaware they are being recorded) Social class: Social catergories of language variation: Socially realistic lexical Socially constituted lexical Sociology/Social-psychology of or language the social as well as the linguistic/Sociology of Language/Social-psychology of Language NCS, SS, Third dialect: the vowel shifts in the pictures below What major north American English vowel differences look like:
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Language and style: penny Eckert- jocks vs. burnouts: said that language variation indexes social categories Language and an index of style: language indexes social categories??? Style and discourse: How you do something in order to position yourself in a group or community. Or the way you do something to position yourself in a group or community. Act of accommodation: accommodating your language or style to subconsciously fit in. Two ways: position accommodation or dialect convergence; and negative accommodation or dialect divergence.
Language and gender: Robin Lakoff wrote "language and woman's place" in 1975; Lakoff described male vs. female language use with a set of binary oppositions-know them o Variation indexes Social Categories (indexicality) o Peers and networks (not parents) o Language and gender: Robin Lakoff, 1975 wrote book, Language and Woman's Place. Men Women Report (purposeful speaking) rapport (gossip) Direct indirect (using hedges-maybe, kinda; tags; and indirect requests) Blunt Polite Use of Full language (purple shoes) empty language (so happy, super cute shoes) All above are STRONG all below are WEAK Eckert: on Jocks and Burnouts says that language variation INDEXES social categories Historical linguistics/language change Comparative reconstruction: Compare the existing forms of something to decide what the original form was. Comparative method: What reconstruction can tell us about society/culture: Principles we use with reconstruction-- majority rule: if more somethings are found than something elses then it probably began with the somethings. Phonetic naturalness/symmetry: lang. like to maintain symmetrical in their sounds. If you have unvoiced sounds, tends to want to have its voiced counterpart as well. If you have a front vowel you want a back vowel to go with it. Not getting front rounded without having back rounded. Markedness: something could be marked or unmarked. Its described relative to something else. The word y'all in the south is unmarked but if a northerner said it then it would be marked. For southerners, the [a ] dipthong vowel i Right [rat] Rye [ra ] Ride [ra d] Language isolates (Basque, Japanese) Proto indo European: William James, 1786, English, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, there is no doubt that all of these languages share the same mother language; Proto Indo European. Germanic: Celtic: History of English: History: English /\ Germanic /\ Proto indo European
/\ ????????(NOSTRATIC) Grimms law: Grimm's Law: goes from voiceless fricatives to voiceless stops and then it goes from voiceless stops to voiced stops f x (h) foot-english night /\ p t k pie-spanish nacht- x p t k /\ b d g pie-spanish b-?? something noktem
Swadesh list--good vs. bad swadesh words: list of words that are relatively stable. Like hunting words and fishing words and cooking words. Technology words change all the time. Glottochrolology: the change in these words is predictable over time. 20% of the words are changed over time. Assumptions of a "basic vocabulary": Etc. Writing: shows up about 6000 years ago First known writing: by the Sumerians, it was cuneiform Guttenberg: movable type first by Guttenberg and he printed the Bible Printing press: only documents language, doesn't speed it up or slow it down Caxton: William Caxton brought the printing press to England. Three major kinds of writingAlphabetic: English Syllabic: Japanese Ideographic: hieroglyphics