Summary AQA A-Level English Language - Language & People Notes
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Course
Language, Diversity & Change
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AQA
AQA A-Level English Language - Language & People Notes - summarised using all the relevant information, with key points and names in bold. Evaluations are clearly marked as + / - which allows for these notes too easily be converted into essay plans.
Includes all sub-topics in the specification.
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Linguistic/Speech Accommodation Theory
-Developed by British language psychologist Howard Giles and others since the early 1970s.
-Their aim was to provide an explanation of why speakers accommodate - change the manner in which they
speak in face to face interactions.
-Two key concepts are convergence and divergence. They denote the general direction in which accommodation
can take place.
-Depending on the attitudes speakers show towards each other, their language varieties and the shared
social context either of these can take place.
-Convergence = speaker modifies their speech to resemble more closely.
-Divergence = speaker linguistically moves in the opposite direction to make their speech sound more unlike the
person they are talking to.
-Within SAT convergent and divergent speech has been explained on the basis of speakers' underlying
psychological motivations which are connected to their use of language.
-Convergent accommodative acts speakers can signal social solidarity and similarity. With divergent
communicative acts speakers can articulate and emphasise social differences and show their own identity.
-Linguistic divergence functions as an identity marker.
-Convergence was not automatically viewed as positive but there are optimal levels of convergence.
-Different types of convergence are possible ex. Upward and downward, unimodal vs. multimodal, symmetrical
vs. asymmetrical, subjective vs. objective.
-More recently referred to as Communication Accommodation Theory which includes a weir range of factors as
accommodation can occur at diverse levels.
William Labov, Martha’s Vineyard
-Martha’s vineyard is an island off the East Coast of the USA that gets a summer flood of 40 000 visitors every
year.
-The Eastern part of the island is more densely populated by the permanent residents, and is the area mostly
visited by the summer visitors.
-2.5% of the population are still involved in the fishing industry, they form the most close knit social group and
are most opposed to the summer visitors. They are viewed as skillful, physically strong, courageous. They
epitomised the old virtues.
-Labov focussed his study on the diphthongs [aw] and [ay].
-He interviewed a number of speakers drawn from different ages and ethnic groups and noted that in the younger
speakers (31-45 years) a movement seemed to be taking place away from the pronunciations associated with
standard New England norms and towards the pronunciation associated with the fisherman.
-A small group of fishermen began to exaggerate a tendency in their speech. They seemingly did this
subconsciously, in order to establish themselves as an independent social group.
-For the new people the new pronunciation was innovative. As more people came to speak in the same way, the
innovation gradually became the norm for those living on the island.
Peter Trudgill, Norwich
-Norwich speech was studied by Peter Trudgill in the 1970s to find out how and why people's ways of speaking
varied.
-One of the variables Trudgill studied was the final consonant in words like walking, running. In standard British
English, the sound spelled -ng is a velar nasal. In Norwich, however, the pronunciation waikin', talkin' is
frequently heard, as if there was simply 'n' on the end.
-Trudgill notes that this feature is not unique to Norwich:
-"Nearly everywhere in the Eng-speaking world we find this alternation between higher-class/formal ng and lower
class/informal n. It goes back to the fact that in Old English (and later) there were two forms, a gerund ending in -
ing (walking is good for you) and a present participle ending in -end (he was walking). The -end form was the
ancestor of -n' and -ing (obviously) of -ing. "
-The two merged - though the sorting out of the two forms in terms of prestige and "correctness" is something
which occurred in the last 300 years.
,Trudgill's study discovered the following:
1. In all social classes, the more careful the speech, the more likely people were to say walking rather than
walkin'.
2. The proportion of walkin' type forms was higher in lower social classes.
3. The nonstandard -in' forms occurred much more often in men's speech than in women's, and this was true for
all social classes.
4. When women were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the
standard -ing forms more often than they really did.
5. When men were questioned about what they thought they were saying, they tended to say they used the
nonstandard -in' forms more often than they really did.
Trudgill's figures for social class and sex differences in the use of the standard, prestige -ing form in Norwich
when people used a formal style of speaking are as follows:
(-ng) in Norwich by social class and sex for Formal Style (Trudgill. 1974a)
Male Female
middle middle class 96 100
lower middle class 73 97
upper working class 19 32
middle working class 9 19
lower working class 0 3
Key terms
Multiple negation / double negative
The more general term refers to the occurrence of more than one negative in a clause. In some languages,
double negatives cancel one another and produce an affirmative; in other languages, double negatives intensify
the negation.
Ex. I don’t know nothing, I didn’t steal nothing, I never saw it
Non-standard subject verb agreement
This is when the subject and the verb do not agree in numbers.
Ex. It were manic in town
Unmarked plurality
Nouns like sheep simply have a plural form that is identical in shape to their singular form. These are often
referred to as unmarked plurals.
Ex. sheep, crockery, footwear, perseverance, nonsense, news
Variations in syntax: double subject construct / emphatic tag
An double subject construct is a subject followed by a verb
Ex. The sheep they look identical
An emphatic tag adds emphasis to a statement by repeating information from the main clause.
Ex. she can be right stubborn, can Maria
Variation in morphology: adding s
This is when an ‘s’ in unnecessarily added onto the end of word
Ex. you likes it though, I likes you
Variation of pronoun use: second person variation / first person variation
Changing the pronouns used
Ex. give us a go
, More or Less Scouse
Sociophonetics & dialect leveling
-Sociophonetics looks at how pronunciation varies according to a range of social parameters. Ex. how male and
female speakers differ or differences between speakers of different classes.
-Comparing the speech of the old and young is one way to investigate whether language has changed.
Dialect levelling
-When linguists have investigated phonological change in other british accents, the overwhelming majority
discover that certain regionally distinctive pronunciation features are gradually disappearing and being replaced
with supralocal features. This phenomenon is called accent levelling.
-A process whereby differences between regional varieties are reduced, features which make varieties distinctive
disappear and new features emerge and are adopted over a wide geographical area.
Phonological change in scouse
-Dr Kevin Watson carried out a study using 13 older speakers (8 male, 5 female) and 16 younger speakers (9
female, 7 male) and compared their speech.
-He looked at the two sounds /t/ and /k/ and considered if they were pronounced using a standard variant (this is,
as a plosive, as they are in other accents).
-If accent levelling was happening in scouse, then younger speakers will use a higher percentage of standard
variant forms than older speakers, because the Liverpool forms will be in decline.
-It was clear that the Liverpool variants were not in decline. For males, the younger and older speakers have
roughly the same number of Liverpool /t/ forms and for /k/ the percentage of liverpool forms actually increases in
the young/
-For the females, the situation is even more stark. Older female speakers use a higher percentage of standard
forms than older male speakers - it seems for the older speakers there is a gender difference for this particular
feature.
-However, this gender difference no longer exists for the young.
-Overall, there was certainly no levelling, there was a marked increase in the use of regionally restricted features
- the opposite of levelling’s prediction.
Paul Kerswill – Dialect Levelling
Dialect levelling is a form of standardisation whereby local variations of speech lose their distinctive, regional
features in favour of a more urban or mainstream dialect. This means that the speech forms of different parts
of the country are becoming more similar over time and this results in a reduction of language diversity. There
are several factors involved in dialect levelling.
-Geographical mobility results in greater dialect contact between commuters.
-Social mobility and consequent breakdown of tight knit working class communities.
-Increased interaction with people of other speech varieties.
-Children are less likely to adopt their parents’ pronunciation as they come under peer pressure to conform to
the linguistic norm of the group. Adolescents take on a vital role in language change.
-Economic change leads to loss of rural employment and construction of suburbs and new towns.
-World Wars meant a change in roles within society, especially WWII when women went out to work and soldiers
mixed with a wide range of geographical and social backgrounds which may never have previously clashed.
Rosewarne’s article: Estuary English
-Estuary English is a variety of modified regional speech. It comes in the middle of RP and cockney.
-Comes from the banks of the Thames and it’s estuary.
-The use of w, where RP uses l in the final position.
-Uses fewer glottal stops for t or d.
-Vowel qualities are a compromise between unmodified regional forms and those of general RP.
-Intonation is characterised by frequent prominence given to prepositions and auxiliary verbs.
-Narrow frequency band.
John Wells: What is Estuary English?
-EE is going to replace RP as the standard accent.
-Features are spreading geographically and socially, thus losing their localizability.
-Associated with standard grammar and usage, but shows these phonetic features:
L-vocalization
Glottaling, using a glottal stop instead of a t sound.
HappY-tensing
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