Juni 20, 2011

sociolinguistic

SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Sociolinguistics is a quickly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the individual and social variation of language. Just as regional variation of language can give a lot of information about the place the speaker is from, social variation tells about the roles fulfilled by a given speaker within one community, or country. Sociolinguistics is a practical scientific discipline researching the language that is actually used either by native speakers, or foreigners, in order to formulate theories about language change.

There are numerous factors influencing the way people speak which are investigated by sociolinguistics:

Social class: the position of the speaker in the society, measured by the level of education, parental background, profession and their effect on syntax and lexis used by the speaker;
Social context: the register of the language used depending on changing situations, formal language in formal meetings and informal during meetings with friends for example;
Geographical origins: slight differences in pronunciation between speakers that point at the geographical region which the speaker come from;
Ethnicity: differences between the use of a given language by its native speakers and other ethnic groups;
Nationality: clearly visible in the case of the English language: British English differs from American English, or Canadian English;
Gender: differences in patterns of language use between men and women, such as quantity of speech, intonation patterns.
Age: the influence of age of the speaker on the use of vocabulary and grammar complexity

An important factor influencing the way of formulating sentences is according to sociolinguists the social class of the speakers. Thus, there has been a division of social classes proposed in order to make the description accurate. Two main groups of language users, mainly those performing non-manual work and those with more years of education are the ‘middle class’, while those who perform some kind of manual work are ‘working class’. Additional terms ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ are frequently used in order to subdivide the social classes. Therefore, differences between upper middle class can be compared with lower working class.

It is notable that people are acutely aware of the differences in speech patterns that mark their social class and are often able to adjust their style to the interlocutor. It is especially true for the members of the middle class who seem eager to use forms associated with upper class, however, in such efforts the forms characteristic of upper class are often overused by the middle class members. The above mentioned process of adopting own speech to reduce social distance is called convergence. Sometimes, however, when people want to emphasize the social distance they make use of the process called divergencepurposefully using idiosyncratic forms.

Sociolinguistics investigates the way in which language changes depending on the region of country it is used in. To describe a variety of language that differs in grammar, lexis and pronunciation from others a term dialect is used. Moreover, each member of community has a unique way of speaking due to the life experience, education, age and aspiration. An individual personal variation of language use is called anidiolect.

There are numerous factors influencing idiolect some of which have been presented above, yet two more need to be elucidated, namely jargon and slang. Jargon is specific technical vocabulary associated with a particular field of interest, or topic. For example words such as convergence, dialect and social class are sociolinguistic jargon. Whereas slang is

a type of language used most frequently by people from outside of high-status groups characterized by the use of unusual words and phrases instead of conventional forms

In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection (the individual's lexicon), grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual. Every individual's language production is in some sense unique. Linguists disagree about exactly what is shared, in terms of the underlying knowledge of the language, among speakers of the same language or dialect.

Idiolect and language

In linguistics, an idiolect is a variety of a language unique to an individual. It is manifested by patterns of vocabulary or idiom selection (the individual's lexicon), grammar, or pronunciations that are unique to the individual. Every individual's language production is in some sense unique. Linguists disagree about exactly what is shared, in terms of the underlying knowledge of the language, among speakers of the same language or dialect.

The notion of a language is used as an abstract description of the language use and abilities of individual speakers and listeners.^[1] According to this view, a language is an "ensemble of idiolects... rather than an entity per se."^[1] Linguists study particular languages, such as English or Xhosa, by examining the utterances produced by the people who speak the language.

This contrasts with a view among non-linguists, at least in the United States, that languages as ideal systems exist outside the actual practice of language users. Based on work done in the US, Nancy Niedzielski and Dennis Preston describe a language ideology that appears to be common among American English speakers. According to Niedzielski and Preston, many of their subjects believe that there is one "correct" pattern of grammar and vocabulary that underlies Standard English, and that individual usage derives from this external system.^[2]

Linguists who understand particular languages as a composite of unique, individual idiolects must nonetheless account for the fact that members of large speech communities, and even speakers of different dialects of the same language, can understand one another. All human beings seem to produce language in essentially the same way.^[3] This has led to searches for universal grammar, as well as to attempts to define the nature of particular languages.

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of morphemes and other units of meaning in a language like words, affixes, and parts of speech and intonation/stress, implied context (words in a lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). Morphological typology represents a way of classifying languages according to the ways by which morphemes are used in a language —from the analytic that use only isolated morphemes, through the agglutinative ("stuck-together") and fusional languages that use bound morphemes (affixes), up to the polysynthetic, which compress lots of separate morphemes into single words.

While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related — differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s," which is only found bound to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of English (a fusional language) recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher, in one sense. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns, or regularities, in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

A language like Classical Chinese instead uses unbound ("free") morphemes, but depends on post-phrase affixes, and word order to convey meaning. However, this cannot be said of present-day Mandarin, in which most words are compounds (around 80%), and most roots are bound.

In the Chinese languages, these are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language. Beyond the agglutinative languages, a polysynthetic language like Chukchi will have words composed of many morphemes: The word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən" is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən, that can be glossed 1.SG.SUBJ-great-head-hurt-PRES.1, meaning 'I have a fierce headache.' The morphology of such languages allow for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, just as the grammars of the language key the usage and understanding of each morpheme.

In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek σύνταξις "arrangement" from σύν syn, "together", and τάξις táxis, "an ordering") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages.

In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish."

Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages. The term syntax is also used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as formal languages used in logic—see syntax (logic)—and computer programming languages—see syntax (programming languages). Although there has been an interplay in the development of the modern theoretical frameworks for the syntax of formal and natural languages, this article surveys only the latter.

Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used by humans to express themselves through language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.

The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long period of time, most notably in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs or symbols as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts. Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, proxemics have semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study. In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in other forms of language, there is other semantic content.

The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties. In philosophy of language, semantics and reference are related fields. Further related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex.

Semantics contrasts with syntax, the study of the combinatorics of units of a language (without reference to their meaning), and pragmatics, the study of the relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users of the language.

In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation. An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside (a geographical or regional accent), the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language (when the language in which the accent is heard is not their native language), and so on.^]

Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word 'accent' refers specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word 'dialect' encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. Often 'accent' is a subset of 'dialect'.

Dialect differences

Because dialect differnces in the knowledge of language between speakers, we expect the following :

-Dialect can differ anywhere language can differ : lexicon, morphology, syntax, semantics, phonology,..

-Distinctive attributes of dialect can be found in other languags of world. That is, a dialect is just another possible human language.

-Linguistic does not define good or bad languages , it simply explains how language work in general.

-As with other social statements, judgements about other people’s languages tell you more about the people making the judgements than about the people who are being judged.

-Because dialect are just possible languages, each person’s language belongs to some dialect. That is, everyone speakers with an accent. The accent is just more or less similar to someone.

Lexicon In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. A lexicon is also a synonym of the word thesaurus. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. The lexicon includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntactic rules and express sememes. In this sense, a lexicon organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker's mind: First, it organizes the vocabulary of a language according to certain principles (for instance, all verbs of motion may be linked in a lexical network) and second, it contains a generative device producing (new) simple and complex words according to certain lexical rules. For example, the suffix '-able' can be added to transitive verbs only, so that we get 'read-able' but not 'cry-able'.

Usually a lexicon is a container for words belonging to the same language. Some exceptions may be encountered for languages that are variants, like for instance Brazilian Portuguese compared to European Portuguese, where a lot of words are common and where the differences may be marked word by word.

When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what words are, how the vocabulary in a language is structured, how people use and store words, how they learn words, the history and evolution of words (i.e. etymology), types of relationships between words as well as how words were created.

An individual's mental lexicon, lexical knowledge, or lexical concept is that person's knowledge of vocabulary. The role the mental lexicon plays in speech perception and production, as well as questions of how words from the lexicon are accessed, is a major topic in the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, where models such as the cohort model have been proposed to explain how words in the lexicon are retrieved.

While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, if not all, words can be related to other words by rules (grammars). For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related — differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s," which is only found bound to nouns, and is never separate. Speakers of English (a fusional language) recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher, in one sense. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns, or regularities, in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

Semantics (from Greek sēmantiká, neuter plural of sēmantikós)^[1][2] is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata.

The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long period of time, most notably in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs or symbols as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.^[3] Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, proxemics have semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study. In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in other forms of language, there is other semantic content.^[3]

The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.^[4] In philosophy of language, semantics and reference are related fields. Further related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex.

What is phonology?

Definition
	Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages.

Discussion
	The phonological system of a language includes
	an inventory of sounds and their features, and rules which specify how sounds interact with each other.
	Phonology is just one of several aspects of language. It is related to other aspects such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics.
	Here is an illustration that shows the place of phonology in an interacting hierarchy of levels in linguistics:

Comparison: Phonology and phonetics

Phonetics …

Phonology …

Is the basis for phonological analysis.

Is the basis for further work in morphology, syntax, discourse, and orthography design.

Analyzes the production of all human speech sounds, regardless of language.

Analyzes the sound patterns of a particular language by

determining which phonetic sounds are significant, and
explaining how these sounds are interpreted by the native speaker.

Models of phonology

Different models of phonology contribute to our knowledge of phonological representations and processes:

In classical phonemics, phonemes and their possible combinations are central.
In standard generative phonology, distinctive features are central. A stream of speech is portrayed as linear sequence of discrete sound-segments. Each segment is composed of simultaneously occurring features.

· In non-linear models of phonology, a stream of speech is represented as multidimensional, not simply as a linear sequence of sound segments. These non-linear models grew out of generative phonology:

A pidgin is the name given to a type of contact language created, usually spontaneously, as a means of communicating between speakers of different tongues. Pidgins have straightforward grammars, and are learned as second languages rather than natively; when a pidgin becomes a first language, this process elaborates it into a full language, known as a creole. Pidgins are studied within the cross-disciplinary field of creolistics, which involves research from linguistics and anthropology, among others.

Pidgin creation

A pidgin is a language that is created through a contact situation - typically, users employ words, or wordlike units, from one or more languages they have some knowledge of, underlain by some of the grammar of their own native languages as well as novel rules that arise through the processes of language acquisition. As the goal is basic communication rather than the acquisition of a new language, the result is a rudimentary language with fewer 'rules' than others - there are fewer sentence types, for instance, so expressing certain complex ideas may be difficult. The pidgin is fine-tuned to the immediate needs of the speakers, who may primarily use it for bartering, friendly introductions, or some other specific purpose. It therefore has no immediate need to be elaborated unless it proves useful for the speech community to develop an extended pidgin, used for more purposes and with increasingly rigid rules. In a minority of cases, extending a pidgin may lead to creolisation.

Examples of pidgins

One example of an extended pidgin is Fanagalo, used in some South African mines, and which is actually taught in underground classrooms to miners of different linguistic backgrounds. Another is Tok Pisin, which is widely used throughout Papua New Guinea, in print as well as in conversation, though for many if not most speakers, the language has become a creole.^[1]

Certain expressions survive from China coast pidgin, a pidgin formerly spoken in Southeast Asia. They have made their way into colloquial English. Many expressions are literal translations from Cantonese grammar. These include, in English (Chinese character and Cantonese pinyin) format:

long time no see (好耐冇見 hao3 noi6 mou5 gin3)
look-see (睇見 tai2 gin3): look and see
no can do (唔得做 m4 dak1 zou6): cannot do
no-go (唔去 m4 qu1): do not go.

Spanglish, commonly believed to be a pidgin of Spanish and English, is actually not a pidgin. It is an example of code-switching because it occurs only among bilingual speakers and retains grammatical and phonological properties of both languages. So is Goleta English, a combined Spanish and English variety as it is spoken by Puerto Ricans, either occasionally when in the island, or daily as immigrants in the United States.

Caribbean pidgins

Caribbean pidgins were the result of colonialism. As tropical islands were colonised their society was restructured, with a ruling minority of some European nation and a large mass of non-European laborers. The laborers, natives, slaves or cheap immigrant workers, would often come from many different language groups and would need to communicate. This led to the development of pidgins. These pidgins have since died out although some, such as Haitian Creole, Jamaican creole, and Papiamento, have become creole languages.

Pacific pidgins

The Melanesian pidgins may have originated off their home islands, in the 19th century when the islanders were abducted for indentured labour. Hence they were developed by Melanesians for use between each other, not by the colonists on whose language they are based. English provides the basis of most of the vocabulary, but the grammar follows closely that of Melanesian languages: hence the use of at least three numbers in pronouns, singular, dual and plural (Bislama also has a trial), and the distinction between inclusive and exclusive we. All also adopt words from local languages. When words are adopted, not only the sound and the meaning, but also the emotional content can change. "Wikit" (Solomons Pijin for pagan, from "wicked") has no connotations of evil.

Several expressions commonly used to exemplify Melanesian pidgins have no known basis in actual use. They include "bigfala bokis garem plande tit, iu hitim hemi kraeout" (E: a big box with plenty of teeth, hitting it, it cries out) for a piano, and "miksmasta blong Jisas" (E: Jesus' food mixer) for a helicopter. The actual words in Solomons Pijin are piana and tiopa. One commentator pointed out that many Melanesians would be far more familiar with helicopters than electric food mixers, and would be more likely to call a mixer "helikopta blong misis".

The best-known pidgin used in the U.S. is the now creolized Hawaiian Pidgin where locals mixed the traditional dialect of Hawaiian with English, Japanese, Portuguese, and other languages of immigrants of Hawaii and Pacific traders.

One of the most famous pidgins in the world is Pitcairnese, spoken mainly on Pitcairn Island, but also on Norfolk Island, an Australian territory.

Another well-known pidgin is Bislama of Vanuatu, based on English but incorporating Malay, Chinese, and Portuguese words.

Common traits among pidgins

Since a pidgin develops as an immediate means of communication, its grammar tends to be straightforward, apparently reflecting 'default' or more common patterns found in the world's languages:

A default subject-verb-object word order;
Uncomplicated clause structure (e.g., no embedded clauses, etc.);
Few or no syllables closed by final consonants (e.g. English tin);
Basic vowels, such as /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ and /o/;
No tones, as are common in West African and East Asian languages;
Separate words to indicate tense, usually preceding the verb;
Words may be reduplicated to represent plurals, superlatives, and other parts of speech that represent the concept being increased;
A lack of morphophonemic variation, e.g. word endings are uncommon and rarely appear in multiple forms, such as /z/, /s/ and /ɪz/ for the English plural -s.

Etymology and origins

The monogenetic theory of pidgins, advanced by Hugo Schuchardt, theorizes that a common origin for most pidgins and creoles exists in the form of Sabir.

The origin of the word "Pidgin" is not clear. It is suggested the word is acquired from the Chinese pronunciation of the business, but it may also be "Pigeon English" in reference to carrier pigeon. The Chinese name for Pidgin, yángjīngbīn (洋涇濱), originated from the name of a river that lay along the boundary of French and British-leased land in Shanghai.

That name is retained in the form Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea and Pijin Blong Solomon (Solomon Islands pidgin).

Pidgin English was the name given to a Chinese-English-Portuguese pidgin used for commerce in Canton during the 18th and 19th centuries. In Canton, this contact language was called Canton English.

creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable, natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins (which are believed by scholars to be necessary precedents of creoles) in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from pidgins.