George Washington University

TRED 256: LINGUISTIC APPLICATIONS

 
 
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   Language & Society
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Grammer Review:

practice |more |still_more | last_chance | key_terms

Talkin' About Talk:  Can you make a living loving language? Chapter 42 (p.183) and

Why do American Southerners Talk that Way? Chapter 26 (p. 116)

Grammar Review

Grammar Terms document

Dialects Do you have an idiolect?

  • Dialect leveling; how has your own dialect changed as a result of moving to the DC area?
Regional Dialects
  • caused by communication barriers
Accents
  • Refers to non-natives' speech patterns
Dialects of English - Types of Differences
  • Phonological
  • Lexical
    • Dialect atlases reflect regional lexical differences
  • Syntactic - between you and I / between you and me What would you call these dialects? Wrong & Right?

Standard Dialect

Language Purists

  • SAE - idealization
  • Language purism crises go back to Greek gramamrians
  • Banned Languages
    • Cajun English/French
    • Native American Languages
    • French Academy
    • Sign language
    • US English imperialism movement
  • Language Revival
Latino English
  • Code-switching
  • Chicano English characteristics
    • homonyms caused by fewer vowel sound distinctions
    • ch  and sh sounds alternated
    • devoicing of some consonants
    • initial consonant substitution /th/ and /d/
    • consonant cluster simplification (word final)
    • prosodic differences
    • sequential constraint - word cannot begin with /s/
  • Other varieties: Cuban, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, El Salvadoran

Pidgins & Creoles
    What's the difference between a pidgin & a creole & a lingua Franca? (let's do a matching!)

1. Language used by common agreement a. ______________________________________
2. rudimentary language formed from two (or more) languages in contact
(with limited lexical items and les comlex grammatical rules)
b. ______________________________________
3. former pidgin language adopted by  community and learned by children as a first language
c. ______________________________________

   
Hatian Creole Examples
Language, Sex & Gender

Video of Robin Lakoff. Robin Lakoff wrote Language & Woman's Place in the early 70s. A revised edition of the book has been published
Her other work includes Talking Power (1992) and  The Language War (2000)

Nancy Pelosi / Hillary Clinton: Woman or Female?

Sex on the Brain (Commentary on "The Female Brain" and the male/female word debate)


Marked & Unmarked terms
Can you identify a change in the language within your lifetime to reflect awareness of gender-marked forms?
(hint: ladies/women)

Activity: How would you make a change to gender-determined language?

Godself: gender-neutral pronoun for God

Name for men equivalent to 'slut' for women

Way to refer to the female president's husband: Mr. President or First Gentleman?


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