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BLOCK A –
CHANGING ENGLISH

UNIT 1 - AN A-Z of ENGLISH
ACCENT –“A way of speaking that indicates a person’s place of origin and/or social class
...

BBC ENGLISH – Generally, broadcasters are still the markers of good spoken English
...
In a 1967 interview by Malcolm
Muggeridge of Lord Rath, the 1st General Director of BBC, he stated that all BBC men spoke
with an educated Southern English voice
...

CODE SWITCHING – In many communities, English is used alongside other language
...

DIALECT – Whereas accent only refers to pronunciation, dialect covers punctuation,
grammar and vocabulary
...
Linguistically, any dialect has rules and if these rules didn’t work perfectly,
people would not be able to understand and communicate
...
In
India, English has become a language of fashion and social status but instead, it should be
seen as a language of knowledge
...
The French feel ‘colonised’ by it
...
Typically we learn that a noun is an object,
a verb is a doing word and an adjective is a describing word
...
In 450 AD The Anglo Saxons invaded and the spread of German i
...
dialects and the
decline of Celtic language took place
...
Now, American English is the dominant world variety
...

JOHNSON (SAMUEL) – In 1755 after 10 years of work, Johnson completed his ‘Dictionary of
the English Language’
...

KWIK SAVE – Playing with spelling is a favourite advertising technique as it is eye catching
and breaks the rules
...


LITERATURE – We have seen a recent explosion of writing in English all across the world,
coining the term ‘New English
...

MOTHER TONGUE – Literally, a language learnt from your ‘mother’ but now covers both
close and extended family
...
It then becomes difficult to know what a
person’s actual mother tongue is
...
Example – 1940: blitz/boffin/genocide, 1950’s: cagoule/washeteria/video tape, 1960’s:
braindrain/underachiever/answerphone, 1970’s: ageist/hypermarket/micro chip
...

OXFORD (E
...
) – In 1879, the OED began to be written and was estimated to take 10 years
...
It was finally published in 1928 with nearly
half a million definitions over 15,000 pages
...
It wasn’t
scripted and used real recordings of people’s speech
...
The character stretched the rules of English as typically some adjectives are formed
by adding ‘able’ to their verb stem
...
g
...

QUESTION TAGS – This covers the way men and woman use English differently
...
g
...
However, this is not always the case
...
This is an example of
sociolinguistics which studies social aspects of language such as class, gender and
conversation
...

SCOTS – Is Scots a variety of English or a language in its own right? A famous poem by Liz
Lockhead entitled Kidspoem/Bairnsung spoken half in Scots and half in English deals with
this question
...
English has become a world language due to the role of the USA
...


US ENGLISH – 1 in 7 children in USA grow up speaking a language other than English
...
The top 10 languages in USA include: English,
Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Korean
...
However, this
does not mean that a person must give up their original language
...
We have
allowed too many Americanisms, split infections and made up words
...
This is done as
people care deeply from a moral viewpoint
...
This
amount to 1
...
Contact with other langue has greatly
enriched the English lexicon and words from over 120 different languages have been
adopted
...

Writers have now abandoned the uneasiness of ‘borrowed’ language and it has now been
‘born again’
...
Some think it is incredible how an
obscure language from a small island grew throughout many difficulties and triumphed as a
world language, whereas others feel it is worrying how English has taken over, spread and is
bringing other languages into decline
...

Sanskrit is the world’s oldest language and share a common rule with English in the fact that
it is part of the Indo European family of language and stretches from the Hebrides to the
Indian Sub Continent
...
Varieties of the same language can
be mutually incomprehensible between two different speakers i
...
a Cockney and a Geordie
...
He focuses on the ‘educated’ British and American
usage only – “our field is no less than the grammar of educated English current in the
second half of the 20th century
...

Kamala Das’s poem ‘Summer in Calcutta’ talks about what English means to him
...
This shows how
people respond to language in different ways and emphases the distinctions of regional
varieties
...
It began as a pidgin to
develop communication between those with no common first language
...
This began in European
colonial times on plantations
...
It is understood by English speakers – just with an accent
...
It is humorously portrayed as a foreign language in the ‘Book of Geordie
...
‘Join ones duties’ for example is referring to a new job yet also doing it
well (dharma)
Another extract shows a boatman speaking Indian English to tourists
...
It sounds rehearsed but is clearly understood
...
‘Iron and steel and hate factories’ for
‘Weston attack’
...
T so anybody outside this genre may not understand the meaning
...
It is highly variable and continually changing
...
This shows how
English can vary according to origin, social group and context
...
’ It is also worth mentioning that
dialect and accent are not clear cut
...
What counts as
distinct English is decided on social/political grounds rather than purely linguistic criteria
...
By the end of the 20th century, English was more widely scattered, spoken
and written than any other, earning it the title of the ‘1st global language
...
’ Does this frequent
focus on its large number imply it is more powerful or better than other languages?
David Crystal states in the time of Queen Elizabeth I there were between 5-7 million English
speakers
...
Now there are far more second language speakers of English than mother tongue
...
Add together all other native English countries
and you get 115 million
...

Crystal splits language learning into two situations
...

Some countries give English a special status as an official language i
...
Ghana and Nigeria
...
Therefore, residents
have no choice but to learn English from an early age
...
These countries have many
indigenous languages representing many ethnic backgrounds so to risk inter-tribal tension
and the feeling of disadvantage; the government chose English to put everyone on the same
footing
...
However, this was motivated by the British Colonial era in the same way
French is the official language of Chard and Portuguese of Angola, and thus negative
connotations are associated too
...
This is shown in India where with a population of
1000 million, half are competent in English
...

This term is used for countries with no official status of English, yet it is taught in schools
from a young age
...
It really is impossible to keep up with its growth
...
100 million people watched the BBC
programme Follow Me, in a bid to learn English
...
Not to mention
the fact that two thirds of scientist write in English, two thirds of mail is in English and 80%
of the internet is in English
...
Unless there
is a dramatic change in the economic fortune and world power of USA, English will continue
to dominate
...
Whereas, Tripathi feels it is an ‘ideological production’ with stats based on
impressions
...
He says that ‘before English, there
was communication and without it, there still will be
...
’ the answers would be a
mixture of British, an enemy, an oppressor, well-educated
...

The historical speed of English can be detrimental to other languages and indeed, in Canada,
its usage is regulated today to protect local language and culture
...
Kenya was a British colony until 1963 when it was finally given its
independence
...
However, others view it as unwelcome and only needed due to Kenya’s dependence
on foreign investment
...
He also feels it takes no more
effort to learn an indigenous language than it does to learn English
...
English is taught in the education system from the very beginning, first in
Swahili and then with all lessons conducted in English
...
This
can cause problems as the teacher must be proficient in both languages
...
A creative response has been Sheng – a linguistic variety spoken by urban youth

in Nairobi
...

However, Njogu, a professor, feels it is important in the formation of identity
...
Samper
appreciates it as a creative response to youth in Nairobi
...
It combines both English and Swahili – is this really a deficiency in language or
evidence of a high level bilingual skill?
CASE STUDY 2 – QUEBEC CANADA
In Quebec and parts of New Brunswick and Ontario, French and English have both an equal
and unequal status
...
’
The English and French have a history of competing in the colonising of Canada
...
However it wasn’t until 1982 when it
was patriated completely
...

The 1960’s saw political mobilisation to promote French and in 1976, the parti Quebequois
came to power
...
Some argue this was done to gain economic access to
Anglophone resources without sacrificing the francophone identity
...
It is taught in schools for international
communication, however, French itself spread through colonisation and conquest rather
like English
...
Marie
Noelle Lang’s article tells us that English in a French context is seen as a good way to reach
the youth
...

Borrowing is defined as ‘language A using and ending up absorbing a linguistic item or
feature from language B which language A did not have
...
If a word has not been integrated into our language, it appears
foreign
...

Least integrated words maintain their original pronunciation such as un scoop, un squat, un
onemanshow
...
Other words such as le Ouebe or un mel have been
integrated after just a decade
...

Other words just resemble a trace of the original – un smoking, le flip
Even new words have been created – flipper, stresser as well as fake words to fill a gap in
the vocabulary
...

English is looked at with a mixture of enthusiasm, reluctant acceptance and hostility
...
As previously mentioned, it
is fashionable among youths identifying with the Anglo-American culture or for utilitarian
reasons – IBM France use English at work, as do scientific congresses and all other leaders of
French industry are familiar with English to stay in the world market race, as are cinemas
...
The Minister of Culture stated France should resist the
promotion of a single language which could demote French to a local dialect
...
In the
16th century it became compulsory to use French in political and legal documents over the
dominance of Occitan and Provencal
...
In 1975, there was a legislation bill
to control borrowings from English
...
Any breach could be reported to the police
...

Te most effective aspect has been the creation of the Commissariat which published the
Dictionnaire de Neologismes Officiels in 1988
...
Some have not caught on such as un bouteur (un bulldozer) but others have,
un baladeur (un walkman) success has been down to media attention
...


Some people feel non native varieties of English could be valued on their own terms
...

People feel Indian English should be accepted alongside USA and British English as it will
only be used to communicate within India
...

Different national norms could fragment English and there is a fear of a single standardised
English
...

Investigating the Ancestry of English
The 18th century physician James Parsons undertook investigations across many European
and Asian languages, reaching conclusions such as Irish and Welsh were ‘originally the
same
...

Soon, comparative philology became well established to see how one language passed
particular traits down to another
...

However, it is now criticised and seen as a ‘cultural interpretation rather than an objective
mirror of reality
...

The University of Sheffield worked on a new family tree between 2001-2004 based on
phonological data which led to a more accurate interpretation
...
When he began looking at Sanskrit, he discovered one of the deepest
roots of English was in India
...

He used this evidence to show all these languages derived from Indo – European languages
and thus, became the basis of modern philology

UNIT 2 – THE ORIGINS OF ENGLISH
Origins of English and Structure of Words
The modern language of Friesland in the Netherlands is closest to the ancestor of modern
English 1500 years ago
...
1000 years ago, a West Germanic tribe settled in
the lowlands of Europe (Holland, Germany, Denmark) From here, they set out across the sea
to Great Britain taking their language with them
...
This gave way to the
term ‘Welsh’ originally used to mean ‘foreigner’ or ‘slave
...
Today only some
words survive – crag, combe and traces in place names:
Torpenhor – peak
Carlisle – fortified
Ealing – people of
Wigton – enclosure or village
Birmingham – farm
By the end of the 6th century, Britain was split into Kingdoms – Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex,
East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria
...
e
...

PLAYER has two morphemes
...
In this case ‘one who does
...

Other examples are WALKS, CALLING AND MUSICAL
...

Other bound morphemes can also mean ‘one who plays: violinist, magician, assistant,
detective
...

Examples such as un – im – il – and ir
...

Note that some patterns occur – ir is always, followed by another r, just as it is followed by
another l, im is followed by either m or p and in is interchangeable
...

Some words have two free morphemes: football, ashtray, shoestring
...
Although these words
could stand alone, they are not free in this context – ‘hood’ is the status of, whereas ‘ship’ is
the qualities of
...
) ish now means approximately and can even
stand alone in sentence
...
e
...
Its Latin root is
‘natus’ being to be born
...


Summary of Chapter 2 (2
...
4) – The Origins of English
When the Romans invaded Britain in the 1st century BC, the country was inhabited by Celtic
speaking people
...
During this time (AD 43 410), Latin was the
official language, although Celtic remained the vernacular
...
Latin was necessary to communicate effectively
...
In the late 4th century, the Romans withdrew from Britain and left many Roman
Britain communities to fend for themselves
...
And
by the 5th century AD, Old English first appeared
...
Firstly, before the Anglo
Saxons immigrated, Germanic tribes already had contact with Latin, living on the borders of
the Roman Empire
...
Secondly, after arriving in Britain, they met a
population familiar with Roman culture and so many words from Latin were picked up again
– tower, port, mount, chester
...
Augustine to convert
pagan Anglo Saxons to Christianity
...

The earliest Anglo Saxon settlements were in the East by rivers and it took nearly 200 years
to establish a frontier with the Celtic West
...
Wales and Cornwall remained
Celtic speaking until 18th century
...
After the conversion to Christianity in the 7th century Latin
contact was renewed and the Roman alphabet was adopted
...

When researching the history of a language, we look internally (linguistics) and externally
(accounts of people and facts)
...
However, when looking at English in particular, there are
various problems: there is very little evidence available prior to the 1st century, relationships
between internal and external sources are contradictory and everything can be interpreted
in different ways
...
Ecclesiastical history of the English people
...
They described the land as fertile and the people
cowardly so more arrived
...
Noticeably Anglo in Mercia and Northumbria, Juke in Kent and Saxon in Wessex
...

It doesn’t mention the Romans use of Germanic mercenaries in Britain to defend the
province
...
It is also obscure what led to regional differences
...
He ‘tidied up’
facts to give a coherent history emphasising his own people
...
This shows the importance of considering who the
author is, their social position and reason for writing
...
However Gildas ‘On the ruin and
conquest of Britain’ he presents different perspectives
...
After 4 centuries of resistance, cultural
‘fusion’ took place
...

External evidence is contradictory, however, as a recent stable isotope analysis showing
where a person grew up, suggested no mass influx of the post Roman population
...
Firstly, why
didn’t the Anglo Saxons end up speaking Celtic? When the Scandinavians invaded
Normandy, they ended up speaking French, as did the Normans with English after 1066
...
Yet this Germanic group kept their language
...

Also Vikings introduced many Scandinavian loanwords; as did the Normans with French
...
It is also hard to see if these words came
from Welsh or continental Latin – ass, for example, could derive from assen (Celtic) or
asinus (Latin) some have a clear connection such as bannoc and broc which appear in
Beowulf
...
One idea is that both groups had so
little in common, there was no motivation to borrow words
...
Another idea is that their lives
were so similar, they already had necessary words and with the Latin presence in Europe,
more attractive sources of words were available
...
There were also genetic
similarities between English and Frisian men with a Welsh border genetic barrier similar to
the ‘ethnic cleansing of today
...
Caedwalla, Caedwallon and Caedmon are all named after Anglo Saxon royalty
...

An old English written text, translated from Latin to old English in the 9th century shows a
poem of Caedmon who was the first person to adopt Anglo Saxon poetic form from
Christianity
...

Vocabulary/Spelling
The similarities between old and modern English are obscured by spelling changes
...

English vocabulary has greatly enlarged since this time, due to influence from other
languages
...
Tide now means ‘sea’
but used to mean ‘time’ or ‘occasion’, think of ‘tidings of comfort and joy: Neata and
scipene may now seem obsolete but in regional dialects they are retained as neat – house
and shippon respectively
...
There are no silent
letters and the change of sound is reflected in the spelling
...

For example, in occurs initially in he sounding like/h/ in hot
...
This makes its sound change
...
This is slightly oversimplified as Anglo Saxon had more than one system of
spelling - Caedmon’s poem in Northumbrian dialect had bearnum for barium and weard for
vard, just as in Modern English, water is pronounced watoa in the South and wat-er in the
North
...
If we look at holy, so, arose, they share as ‘o’
sound just as out, thou, house share an ‘ou’ sound
...
This shows there was
still a continuity that has perhaps changed with time
...

Structure – Word Order and Inflections
In the old English sentence ‘ut was gongesde’, we see that ‘out’ is placed at the beginning of
the sentence
...
It comes at the end whereas modern English places it immediately after
the subject
...
Poetry was based on stressed syllables and
alteration
...
Heofron to hrofe
...
Word is written as both word and wordum in the text
...
Just like Latin, morphemes were added to change the meaning
...
g
...

Contact between old English and other languages
As we have already stated, Anglo Saxon came from Germanic dialects and estimates assume
there were 25,000 words at the time – many of which still exist today, just slightly
differently –k game (gamual and ground (grund)
...

Continually from this date until the 11th century, the Vikings continued to arrive, plunder
and return home before finally settling in East Anglia in 865 AD
...

Old Norse was sp[reading rapidly and Old English faced oblivion
...
Alfred
defeated their 5000 troops and Old English remained
...
Alfred granted them a Kingdom named Danelaw and from then on,
Danes and Saxons met for business or to intermarry
...
; this led to
a huge expansion in vocabulary
...
The pattern of adoption was different as there were fewer
borrowings and more new concepts or cultural artefacts
...
‘Any place names ending in by (town) were Norse,
as well as Thorpe (village) and thwart (portion of land)
...
Words
with ‘sk’ entered the vocabulary – sky, skirt
...
In some cases, both words still survive
...

Sick/ill
...
The language became isolated and its
grammatical relations were signalled by word order
...

External factors could be blamed for this change - i
...
repeated invasions, yet internally it
was affected to with an almost ‘built-in instability
...
Vowels became reduced to a schwa sound making
endings redundant
...
’ Speakers began regularising paradigms and deleting endings
...

And neuter nouns such as hus were even worse as they remained the same in both singular
and plural
...
Linguistic change cannot be brought about by one speaker
alone either – unless there is a wider usage, it will not be used in the language
...
They noticed that people adopt change from powerful or prestigious
groups according to their position, status and contact in society
...
After Ethelred’s exile, it became ‘prestigious’ to speak

Old Norse – historian Kastovsky denies this and states the large number of adoptions into
English of Scandinavian vocabulary suggest an abandonment in favour of English
...
After all, they both came from Germanic language so it was possible that people
became bilingual
...

English encountered many Scandinavian words similar in Old English e
...
summer was
sumer/sumar yet inflected in Viking gave sumera and in English sumri: Perhaps the
inflectional differences were resolved by simply getting rid of them
...
This began in 587 when monk Augustine led a mission
to Kent and with that, brought back Latin- The international language of the church
...

From here on, literary texts prevailed, notably Bede’s history book, the poem Beowulf and
the Anglo Saxon Chronicle
...

The 10th century saw the revival of learning in Benedictine Monasteries and the scriptorium
in Winchester began regularising spelling and standardising English
...

Transition to Middle English
1066 was a decisive year for the English language
...
Knowing that he was
going to die soon, Edward sent his wife’s brother Harold to declare William the new King of
England
...
William was
outraged and rushed to Hastings where they fought an iconic battle ending in Harold’s
death
...
The installation of the Normans was decisive to England’s history – whilst some
view it as a milestone to civilisation, others link it to England’s ‘decline’ wrecking a
sophisticated Anglo Saxon culture with ‘foreign’ tyrannical French
...
The late 18th century brought
about an Anti French Mythology: Sir Walter Scott’s story Ivanhoe mentions Norman French
as a ‘language of honour’ whereas Anglo Saxon was ‘abandoned to the use of rustics and
huds
...
As time
went on the most important source of influence became central French of the King’s court
in Paris
...

For 300 years all Kings spoke French as a first language
...

Many Norman land owners learnt English after the conquest but ‘equal competence was
rare: One bilingual group were the latiniers who mediated between Norman land owners
and labourers
...
However,
strangely enough when the link broke in 1204, English became more autonomous, yet
French grew stronger! Nobility had to learn central French with tutors as a social aspiration
became associated
...

Anglo Saxon was seen as ‘more manly and expressive
...
’
The pattern shows the English adopted French words to refer to things that already had
names
...
e
...
Some words co-existed
with their central French counterpart – warden (guardian) gaol (jail) Central French became
the written medium with 10,000 words (21% of English vocabulary) derwing from French
...
A poem written in
Surrey 130 years after the invasion, entitled The Owl and the Nightingale, shows an
adoption of French verse
...
In fact , the only French word used is plant (pleading) – a typical legal term, we do
see two different forms of the indefinite article – an and one
...

A century later, a poem was written in York – this showed no French adoptions and
furthermore, no ‘rounding’ of the a sound in the North
...
A similar pattern is seen
with the third person inflection – lies as in caaelmon the ending was p
...
S replaced sh and q for wh but this was exclusively

Norman
...

There is no evidence that regional differences were a problem
...
’ The South was seen as superior due to its wealth
and population
...

By the last half of the 14th century, English became increasingly used once more
...
Others saw it as patriotism,
expressing hostility toward the French
...
’ This statute ensured that all
would obey the law
...
Londoners no longer gave traditional demands and thus workers
bargained for wages, leading to the peasants Revolt of 1388
...

The church began showing acute divisions too – Collards preached against corrupt practise
in English to appeal to the lower classes showing this wasn’t about national identity or
pride
...
Chaucer
‘embodied the spirit of Englishness: But this was actually an idea of his contemporises –
quite often work was anonymous and it is only in modern times that naming writers began
...

In 14th century, the Royal Court became bilingual and given that from 1337 onwards,
England and France were at war with one another, language became a conflict among the
wealthy merchant class
...

In education, English replaced French as the language of instruction
...
A particular variety was developed
using the London variety of a South East Midlands dialect
...
This was less subject to internal
variation and characteristics of earlier forms of Middle English
...
The chaucery seeked
to eliminate spelling variations based on local pronunciation and re-spelt words according to
their own conventions, standardising spelling
...

90% of England still spoke English throughout the conquest
...
French vocabulary
entered our language significantly, even if their grammar didn’t
...


Summary of Chapter 3 – Modernity and English as a National Language
From the 15th century onwards, language and the whole of European society became
modern
...

Modernity can be understood in both economic and social ways as well as a state of mind:
intellectually, it is based on self-knowledge and rational argument rather than subservience
to dogma, whereas socially it is seen as the rise of capitalism
...

The Renaissance
The Renaissance was an intellectual movement that begun in Italy in 15th century cantered
on a ‘revival of learning,’ Scholars rediscovered works of classical Greek and Roman
intellectuals
...
The concept of a ‘nation
language’ arose here yet it was seen as inferior to Greek or Latin – essentially an ‘instrument
to be shaped to suit national purpose
...
In fact, Henry VIII is said to have borrowed £1 million on the Antwerp
Market in the last four years of his reign
...
England was
a chief wool exporter: now it began to manufacture and export cloth instead
...

Merchants centralised production in manufactories where they could supervise workers and
manage labour division
...
Peasants became labourers or factory workers too, changing the
social landscape
...
Industries
became rich yet those on a fixed income suffered
...

The Reformation
This time signalled the breaking away from the Roman Catholic faith and institutional
authority of the Church in Northern Europe
...
Yet by the 16th century, tenets of faith were
being challenged with some favouring less elaborate worship based on individual faith

(Protestants) This was originally a matter of religious doctrine championed by European
leaders who set u[ states independent of the Pope’s authority e
...
Henry VIII in the 1530’s
...
Scholars regarded human conditions as a product of humans and not
God
...
The expansion of knowledge was due to both the discovery of new countries
through exploration as well as the sudden boom in scientific research
...
‘Modern’ science began
as knowledge began to result from proof of hypothesis
...
They favoured an even purer form of
worship
...
’ And championed English over Latinate eloquence
...
’ The use of English had a vested interest as
that way; they could appeal to the masses
...
Puritans were drawn to science as they felt it worked with God, revealing humanities
divinity and beauty
...
The Monarchy’s power was growing and was
continually challenged by Parliament
...
The puritans had circulated
pamphlets stating the king was a tyrant and ownership of any property was wrong
...

The Process of Standardisation
This marks a period when Modern English saw fundamental change in its sociological
structure
...
Standard language provided agreed norms of usage,
seen in dictionaries and grammar books and distributed in a wide range of institutions such
as universities and science
...

It comprises four main processes
...
SELECTION – an existing language variety must be identified as a basis (typically the
most powerful)

2
...

3
...

4
...

Essentially 'a minimal variation in form, maximum variation in function
...
In
England, the process was partly deliberate through a combination of social and economic
conditions
...
’ An ideal, imaginary form of English was rhetorically
appealing yet not clearly identified
...

Focused linguistics have a strong set of norms that determine the focusing of a language:
1
...

3
...


Close daily interaction in the community
...

A sense of common cause or group loyalty, perhaps a perception of common threat
...


Selection
Caxton was the first person to bring printing to England in 1473 when The History of Troy
was printed
...

It is something we take for granted yet this only arose after the Resistance
...

The end of the classes and the rise in vernacular is an important watershed in Western
language tradition
...
Latin was now a moribund language and Europe no
longer had a lingua franca
...
This was a time when writers still apologised for writing in English
...
’ The inferiority of the vernacular was a

much laboured point
...

Caxton felt English was ‘destined to linguistic vacillation’ as it was born under the sign of the
moon
...
Every European
country was a patchwork of dialects and this was seen as a problem for the first time
...
He didn’t know which dialect was most widely understood, nor how to spell dialect
as there was no accepted assignment of letters to dialectical pronunciations
...

These changes could not be looked up in a grammar book or dictionary as none existed for
English
...
Yet these problems were now
highlighted with the printing press
...
There was no stable language to
replace Latin so printing made the basic assumptions of society and its linguistic
organisation be rethought
...
Secondly printing gives mass
replication at a great speed showing great unprecedented marketing opportunities
...
Ironically, Caxton’s problem would not have existed had this happened 200
years earlier
...

He adopted the dialect of London and South East Midlands leading to rapid language
change
...
Caxton helped familiarise people
with East Midlands dialect and appealed to the middle class with his comparison of English
as variable as the effects of the moon
...

Elaboration
For the first time ever, English was evaluated as a medium of communication
...
Others felt it could be ‘made perfect’ and
turned into an eloquent language
...
It made a
language more persuasive
...
To prevent repetition, synonyms had to be used for stylistic
variation
...
It
was decided to:

-Extend the lexicon (between 1500-k1700, 30,000 new words were added with 300 a year at
its pecks
-Give new meaning to existing words
-Imitate the rhetorical structure of Latin
...

Thomas Nashe credited these poets with cleaning ‘our language from barbarisms and
(making) the vulgar sort here in London to aspire to a richer punitive of speech’
...

Why Science Came to Be Written in English
Scholars began extending their knowledge along with an interest in world exploration and
trade
...

Copernicus was able to publish and circulate his ideas to a wider audience and an economic
interest in translation began
...
When Galileo said he agreed with
Copernicus, the Pope banned Italian scientist publications stifling new science in Italy
...

The Royal Society
England was one of the first countries to adopt the ideas of Copernicus
...
In 1653, Wallis published
a grammar book of English which was ‘an important landmark in the history of phonetics
and English grammar
...

Across Europe similar academies arose with new national traditions of science, all published
in the country’s national language
...

Sweden chose a bilingual policy to print everything in both Latin and Swedish
...
Also,
there were concerns for secrecy as the public domain could see ideas being stolen
...
Latin
kept a socially restricted audience especially for medicine and surgery
...
It was not well equipped for scientific vocabulary
with no technical lexicon or the right grammatical resources to sound objective
...

In 1665, the Royal Society released a scientific journal – philosophical Transactions which
was the first international journal
...
By
the end of the 18th century, there were 401 German journals, followed by 96 in French and
50 in English
...

It was seen as a literary language, not suitable for logical argument
...

Terminology
Translators had to either ‘borrow’ Latin terms entirely and adapt them or translate Latin
words literally, invent an English word or extend the meaning of an existing word
...
However, a lot of scientific
terms such as algebra, zephyr came from Arabic as well as diagonal, pentagon from Greek
...
Translators had to be
careful not to insert too many foreign terms, however, as this could make the text
inaccessible
...
g
...
Shakespeare often did this, with examples from King Lear, including ‘strangered’ or
‘befrunded
...
’ Both science and Shakespeare
gave new models for the world:
Happening A is the cause of Happening X
Events began to be expressed through a nominal form instead of narrative
...
The verb described a relationship between processes yet
now logic and entities were being brought together
...
The linguistic cost
meant confusion could occur: does ‘increased smoking’ mean ‘smoking more’ or ‘an
increase in smoking?’
Codification
The 16th century saw English taught in schools for the first time
...
It

was essentially based on the grammar of Latin, yet grammar books had been compiled for
years elsewhere, the earliest being Dionysius Thrax in 100BC
...

The first grammar book that attempted an English description was Bullokar’s ‘Brief
Grammar for English’ in 1586
...

‘Standard’ as a linguistical term was first applied in the 18th century in London and was
considered a ‘level of excellence
...
He wanted to emulate France and Italy
and set up an academy to regulate usage, but this came to nothing
...

Johnson saw the English language as copious without order and energetic without rules – it
needed perfecting
...
He felt the language was gradually decreasing in
standard due to the French influence as well as commerce which simplifies the language
...
’ He saw language as cyclical and was opposed to an
Academy as he saw it as an oppression of liberty
...

He saw two negatives in a sentence as being illogical and incorrect as like algebra, they
cancel each other out giving ‘I don’t know how to sing : not ‘I do not know not how to sing
...

John Wallis’ dictionary of 1791 acknowledged a range of dialectical pronunciations and gave
rules to be observed by Scotland and Ireland
...
He particularly hated the Cockney accent
deeming it ‘1000 times more offensive and disgusting’ than anything else
...
There were long debates over what to put in it but finally it was decided that:
1
...

3
...

5
...

All English books would be viable authorities
...

The history of each word, form and sense must be charted
...


The first point was sacrificed and technical vocab along with dialect was left out and made
into a separate project when in 1898 a dialectical dictionary was published
...
’
Point two was appealing to the shared past as a growing gulf between groups could be
bridged
...

The dictionary ended to go no further back than ‘the English type of language’ i
...
1250 And
Anglo Saxon ‘unintelligable’ words were to be ignored
...

The dictionary was primarily historical and showed change in meaning
...

Implementation
Obviously, the 16th century introduction of printing enabled documents to be widely
distributed and read as well as simultaneously
...
’
The merchant class could now afford books but couldn’t read Latin so printing also gave way
to a huge increase in translation into South Eastern English
...
Politically, Catholic Church laws in Latin were authorised by Henry
VIII to be translated, symbolising a challenge to the church’s power
...
Therefore, when Henry VIII closed all monasteries in 1530, it gave access to a huge
range of previously inaccessible manuscripts
...

In Puttenham’s ‘The Arte of English Poets’, he refers to the type of English appropriate for a
poet
...
He states that dialectical speech is a sign of social status and that its
written norm is not the same as spoken
...


Puttenham was seeking the favour of Royal Court by using the language of courtiers
...

This was further highlighted in the 18th century when wealthy children began being sent to
‘public schools
...
1870 saw the start of compulsory education which focuses clearly on
the application of standard English, reducing Scotland to a mere English dialect
...
People saw
dialects as an authentic source of English culture unadulterated by industrialisation and
urban living
...
Wordsworth’s own collection of poetry aimed to satisfy the ‘rustic life of
ordinary people
...
Workers
self-educated themselves in textile factories and by the 1850’s, industrial cities had their
own local papers
...
Today it is seen as a
significant link to the past, finding due to education
...
’
Dialect was essentially rural yet in the Industrial Revolution when workers moved to cities,
they were seen as ‘barbarians’ and ‘outsiders
...
Today, urban speech is more
acceptable and now dialect refers to cities as well as countryside
...
It was inclusive yet
unsure of its boundaries
...
The printing press was a huge source of national pride and led to English as a
universal scientific language
...
To summarise, one single homogenous variety of English will
never be achieved
...
They
covered the story of a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury and the tales they tell
along the way
...
Some educated clergyman used
many French words whereas the miller spoke colloquial Old English
...
He even gave Northerners their first appearance with flat vowel sounds
...

The Gutenberg printing press gave way to the manufacture of books in grand volume
...
Sadly he was killed in 1536 for here say,
despite Henry VIII breaking from Rome shortly after
...
By the end of the 16th century, the King James I
standardised Bible was printed in a deliberately archaic Tyndall style to show the authority
of speech from the past
...
However, a descent
known as the Inkhorn Controversy was building
...
He objected to the incursion of classical words and
deemed that they ‘polluted’ English
...

Although this period saw a great rise in the number of dictionaries published, one of the
most significant came to be Robert Cowdry’s
...
By the end of the 1600’s half of Britain had minimal literacy
...
Playwrights transformed the English language mixing higher class
words with lower class –k Shakespeare stood out and attracted enormous crowds of 30003500 to The Globe
...

Shakespeare’s English has the beauty that it can still be understood perfectly today
...
His plays have defined the way we think
dealing with contemporary issues
...

Shakespeare was taught in English yet studied Latin at school
...
Shakespeare’s main teaching came from church as he didn’t attend
university
...
He invented compound
words such as baby-eys and fair-play
...
He
uses many Midland regional words too such as pash (smash) or keck
...

Shakespeare’s monosyllables made his work so unique as they are the most poetic and deep
feeling
...
Shakespeare used
imagery – Prospero’s staff represents his pen and when it is broke at the end of the play, it

signifies the end to Shakespeare’s writing
...

Towards the Meaning of Words
‘Language is a flexible system of signification
...
Some would take this
view and say that language has no boundaries to the flexibility of meaning
...
Perception has horizons made up of other
possibilities of perception
...

Another example would be a man mowing the lawn in the back garden
...
’ And the lady responds that ‘he is working’
and ‘mowing the lawn
...
We see two examples of ‘working’ here –k
both correct when understood in their own context
...
A clear
distinction must be made between speaker meaning and sentence meaning
...
Nose
would be the easiest to convey as you have a reference
...
Although
there is no single, universal colonial experience, each colony follows a common sequence of
events:
1
...

2
...
Nationalist reaction (sometimes led to independence)
...

Colonies beyond the UK began in the 16th century for various reasons:
1
...


2
...
A
large class of vagrants and dissidents would provide labour overseas
...
Political – there was rivalry with other leading nations such as Spain, Holland and
France
...
Displacement – substantial settlement by 1st language speakers displaced precolonial population (North America)
...
Subjection – sparser settlements maintained pre-colonial population in subjection
adopting English as a 2nd language (Nigeria)
...
Replacement – pre-colonial population was replaced by a new African labour force
(Jamaica)
The English government became responsible for Celtic territories administration:
1536 k- England included Wales
...

By the 19th century, all territories were officially British with English as the language of the
state and the British Empire formed overseas
...
Linguistically English was a powerful model yet political corporation was looser
until the 19th century when previously it was controlled by trading companies
...
By the late
18th century different forms of nationalism emerged
...
Celtic territories
particularly felt this and fought for a revival in these native tongues
...

1867 – Fearing precedent, Canada receives a dominion status
...

1907 – New Zealand becomes a dominion
...

1931 – The Statute of Westminster confirms the independence of all dominions
...
In India and Africa, political
independence was the key aspect
...
Some became local
languages of low status whereas others were codified, standardised and adopted as an
official language
...
In North America and Australia, pre-colonial populations had a low
influence on the English language with only some words that expresses new animal or
geographical features being adopted
...

In all colonies, the English speakers were a diverse group of people – some were of lowly
social position yet powerful among pre-colonial populations, others were economic
migrants of rural communities, affected by famine and others were political or religious
refuges
...

Over time, these varieties mixed and the differences coded creating a new variety
...
This was encouraged through close trading links with England and
high status government representatives sent to these colonies
...

Internal differentiation was caused by contact with the local language, social hierarchy and
relationship with Britain
...
The English language had intimate contact with
other languages creating new, radical variations
...
This is known as substrates
...
A good example is Irish – English and an extreme
consequence is the pidgin and create variations of the 17th century slave trade
...
English law was
introduced and new towns were built
...
By the
14th century, many colonists married among Irish and adopted their manners, fashion and
language
...

The 16th century saw control reasserted when Henry VIII demanded his true subjects to
speak ‘the English tongue
...
John Davis in 1610 declared the Irish ‘wild’ and ‘filthy’
...

The new colonists clung to their Protestant identities and forced the Irish to resettle in the
poor West
...
Ireland was subjugated to the United Kingdom in 1800
...
The 19th century saw Irish
further decline due to depopulation, 9famine caused death and emigration0 the
introduction of universal English education and the becoming of English as language of the
Catholic Church and Independence Movement
...

Before the 19th century, Irish was the 1st language of the whole population – now it is
spoken by just 2% of Southern Ireland
...
English is the 2nd
official language
...

Hiberno-English is very influenced by the Irish language and this has in fact increased over
time
...

Grammar is a controversial subject yet clefting has been known –‘it’s looking for more land
a lot of them are
...

Colonisation of Scotland
Between AD400-800, Scotland was invaded by various groups leading to 5 linguistic groups
by the 10th century – Gaelic Scots, Brythonic Celtic, Anglo Saxon, Norman and Old Norse
...
The dominant group was
Scottish Gaelic spoken by the centralised monarchy
...
They adopted town
building which attracted English merchants making the Royal Court speak ‘Inglish’ by the
13th century
...

Scotland remained an independent ‘state’ for 300 years with its own educational,
administrative and legal system
...

When Elizabeth I died childless in 1603, James VI of Scotland was invited to become James I
of England
...
Gaelic remained in the highland
areas yet over the next 100 years, depopulation led to its decline
...
’

Scots established a national identity based on whether they were from the high or lowlands
...
’ Derrick McClure
argues that Scots is its own language – he agrees it began as a Northumbrian dialect but
sees it as becoming independent in the Middle Ages, just as Portuguese and Spanish have
similarities
...

The Spread of English Beyond the British Isles
The establishment of English speaking colonies in North America in the 17th century was the
first decisive stage in colonial expansion, making English an international language
...
The pilgrim Fathers landed
their Mayflower in Plymouth, Massachusetts later in 1620, creating the most successful
colony for settlers
...
These pilgrims
sought religious freedom and expanded to Pennsylvania
...

The South of America became a huge plantation area in contrast to the North’s small
holdings
...
In 1724, there were 3 slaves to every free person in South Carolina
...

People claim many differences between American and British English is known as ‘colonel
lag
...
The London /r/- leis/ speech
occurred too late to influence the speech of those who had left already
...

Some dialect variation arose from contact with different indigenous languages
...

Native Americans were reluctant to change and thus, pushed West as the colony expanded
...

All these words have been radically changed and ‘Americanised
...
In general, given the reduction in American Indians,
their relatively slight influence on English is unsurprising
...
The only thing that has remained are the large
number of American place names of Indian origin
...
The different economy of the South also pulled its speech habits in a different
direction to the North
...
People
became increasingly aware of these differences and when they became independent in
1783, this was a burning issue for founders
...
In order to do this
they had to ensure that American English looked different to British English as seen by 2 for
5
...
Ever since, the South has been seen as an older, agricultural place outside
of mainstream America
...

Another source of differentiations is the diversity in the American population since the late
18th century
...
‘General American’ derived from here
...
’
In the 20th century, many began to see this ethnic diversity as a threat for America
...
Even today, black descendants of slaves are less than full
American citizens
...

Moving on, Sierra Leone was where the first European slave expedition occurred after 1807,
it was settled by escaped and freed slaves
...
This gave these slaves back their African ‘homeland’
...

After 1880, new British colonies were established in Africa
...
Now, only a small number of British
officials administered here and the population remained principally African
...

In the 19th century, Britain began to see these colonies as a great producer of raw materials
...
Dark skinned people
were seen as primitive to the white European therefore colonial duty was seen as a service
to demonstrate ‘manliness
...
This British
colonialism set the tone for the whole of Africa in general
...
PanNegroism emerged, followed by pan-Africanism, yet the language remained English
...

Edward Blyden, a Caribbean born scholar argued English was best suited to unify Africans
because it is ‘a composite language, not the product of any one people
...

The diversity of African society has been labelled ‘tribalism
...
Therefore, English should help Africans recreate
their identity as members of a nation
...
This is a dangerous point of view which encodes particular ways of thinking
...
Nigerian English must be justified in terms of observed usage through
interference, deviation and creativity
...
Irrespective of their first language, there are features typical in the pronunciation
of most Nigerian English speakers
...

Although some Nigerian usages can be listed to lexis and syntax of the mother tongue,
usually they arise from language development, narrowing or extending meaning such as ‘my
father have travelled’ in the sense of being away
...
g
...

The deviation approach involves comparing the two languages and labelling all differences
‘deviant
...
’ The weakness is that it tends to suggest the observed
usage is ‘imperfect’ or ‘non-standard’ English
...

The creativity approach focuses on the exploitation of the resources of the Nigerian
languages as well as English to create new idioms
...
This approach recognises
Nigerian English as a type in its own right
...
Some words become
plural (equipments, aircrafts) ‘to’ is dropped from some infinitives (enable him do it) a
preposition may be employed differently (discuss about) and a construction is used putting
the subject as a focus and the anaphoric pronoun as a subject (the politicians, they don’t
often listen to advice
...
New lexical
items can be coined ‘invitee’ for guest and ‘go-slow’ for traffic jam
...
’ Some lexical items acquire new meanings – ‘globe’ is an electric bulb and
‘corner’ is a bend in the road
...
Certain idioms acquire new meanings – ‘to eat
one’s cake and have it
...

Another example is the change in word meaning depending on the context
...

Returning to the slave trade, its long term effects are immense
...

In 1562, Sir John Hawkins sailed to West Africa and captured 300 Africans
...
This marked the beginning of the
slave trade
...
The Portuguese established this when trading with Africa middle-men who
traded slaves for goods
...

It is hard to find exact dates on the slave trade yet an account by Ligon tells us that the
slaves came from all over Africa and thus could not understand one another
...
Pidgin would have been the only
way to communicate yet its vocabulary and grammar was limited
...

The first stage of creole development is indigenisation
...


Creoles are interesting as all across the world they share the same grammatical
characteristics
...
English creole is totally different from English but is named this way as English was
the lexifier language
...
By 1673, these were
matched by African slaves and in 1746 slaves outnumbered them by 10 to 1
...
In South USA, Wolof, a language that is still spoken in Senegal today was used
there
...

The fact many African words are still used in Jamaican creole today show the vast
‘catchment area’ slaves were obtained from
...

Since the 19th century, formal education of standard English has been available in Jamaican
...
New varieties of Jamaican speech have evolved
alongside creole which is still seen as a sense of local identity
...

Yet for others it is a result of exploitation and oppression
...
Although, it is seen as cultural
imperialism, it can also be regarded as a sense of ‘ownership’ of English where it has passed
out of the hands of the ‘native-speaking’ country
...
Every time a new language
was found, English soaked up new words
...
’ The settlers firstly drove the Caribes off the island, then
moved onto tobacco and sugar plantations where they imported slaves from Africa
...

Guyanese Creole
Guyanese Creole is difficult to state exactly as there are no exact written records or
audiovisual material available for it
...
We do know, however, that there is a creole
continuum in Guyana, all consisting of various levels of standardising which we define as
basilect or mesolect
...
Nowadays, there is a lot of pressure on the
Guyanese to use standard varieties; however, others see this as ‘selling out
...
She comes from a rural town with little education and uses structures such as ‘me’
when she means I – ‘me used to go,’ ‘ii’ for the third person singular, ‘wan’ for a/an and ‘bin
got’ as an anterior tense marker – ‘me bin gat
...

Mother, however is of the non-estate class – she grew up in Georgetown and came from a
working class family
...

Case study – Trinidad and Tobago
Rather a creole continuum in Trinidad and Tobago, general consensus feels there is a
prominence of three creole varieties, all suitable for different situations, which in turn
sustains them
...
There is also mesolect, referring to an intermediate type
which may seem like standardised English on first glance but is actually subtly different
...
’ This is the lingua franca of Trinidad and Tobago, whereas acrolect
refers to standard English
...
Yet, as long as these
three varieties, exist there is hope that they may stabilise and continue in usage
...

The name comes from the fact that the head of domesticated staff is called a Butler in India
...

Butler English is essentially a simplified and reduced version of Indian English
...
However, in contrast, the
domestics continue speaking Indian together and only use Butler English with their masters
...
g
...
There is also
no possessive suffix –‘master friend who like food’ or no verb agreement – ‘yes, master like
it
...
’ Verbs do not have tense forms and their present form ends in ‘ing’ so
‘I starting work 20 years ago’ will only be understood in the past thanks to ‘ago’
...
Vocab is increased thanks to compound words too such as ‘tennisboy’ or
‘platematey
...
e
...

Sometimes new words are coined such as ‘Englishtime’ and ‘Marriagetime’
...
Sometimes there
is a semi-duplication in rhyme such as ‘bed/ged or linen/binen
...

Describing the Sounds of English
When referring to phonology, English has around 20 vowels – phonemes
...
Phonologically, a vowel is produced when the airflow from the lungs
escapes uninterrupted through the vocal tract and out through the lips with no obstruction
to cause friction or blockage
...

Consonants are defined by:
-Where in the vocal tract the obstruction occurs
-What type of obstruction takes place
-Presence or absence of voices
So when considering /p/, we know it is a bilabial, voiceless stop as the obstruction occurs at
the lips, they close fully and the vocal cords do not vibrate
...

When looking at how different accents use consonants (RP, cockney and Irish), we note very
interesting things
...

In this case, cockney would say ‘VIS n VAT’ and Irish ‘DIS an DAT’
...
In the
subsequent ‘thick and thin’, RP would say /QIK n QIN/ / using a voiceless dental fricative
whereas cockney would use ‘fik n fin’/ and Irish /tik n tin/

Cockney is therefore known for its th-fronting – when the point of articulation moves
forward from contract between tongue and teeth to contact between lower lip and top
teeth
...

There are similarities between the three: RP’s dental fricative becomes cockney’s labiodental fricative and Irish’s alveolar stop
...

In the cockney version the ‘t’ in that becomes a glottal stop; /r/ This used to be stigmatised
with the lower-class, yet, it is now used in most accents of English
...
A good parameter to use is:

The vowel /i/ is high at the front of the moth
...
In contrast, /a/ comes from the lower back of the mouth as /a/
comes from the lower front
...

These movements can be verified through self-observation /i/
...


Observations of phonemic transcription can tell us a lot
...
The second ‘e’ in present disappears too!
Using the example of ‘handkerchief’, the ‘a’ becomes a /g/ due to the ‘k’ influence
...

‘Children’s literature’ sees the ‘e’ weakened to a /e/ while the first ‘e’ in literature totally
disappears
...

Accent as Social Symbol
Accent has the ability to arouse extremely strong feelings in listeners
...
Accent carries implications of class, intelligence and personality but only
will be understood if one can place it within its social and regional context
...
Although some may have
felt that one variety of language had a higher value than another and thus, should be
imposed on the community, this did not yet extend to pronunciation
...

By the time of Thomas Sheridan in 1762, this tolerance of spoken diversity was being
challenged – he felt if spellings and grammar were standardised, then why not accent? This
was ideological to a certain extent
...
The London social elite
pronunciation is described as polite and desirable and should be a standard for all speakers
...
Provincial’s
meaning had changed to mean ‘a desire for the culture and manners of the capital
...
He constantly sees it as a disgrace
...
His book is persuasive as it sensitises readers to the values
of one form of speech and the demerits of choosing another
...
He feels one can obtain it by recognising where their fault lies, remove
that fault and become conscious of the defects
...
This led to two major developments: the rise of
elocution and the rise of pronouncing dictionary
...
Also early affordable
manuals on linguistic etiquette were made available to the masses
...

A new development in the 18th and 19th century was a rise in learning pronunciation at
school
...
Sheridan was
fundamental to this and saw an early acquisition of a standard accent as central to the
remedy of such ‘disorder
...
However, 19th century people had to acquire one accent alone
...
He highlighted ‘defective
intelligence’ when provincialisms invade the language to change the long u to the short u
(push and cute) as well as ‘idea-r’ or the aspirate /h/
...
He sees any differences as inferior and
show a deficient in intelligence
...

19th century school inspectors reports are played with comments on ‘regional peculiarities
and the need for good pronunciation
...
Firstly, boarding
schools emerged which provided non-localised education for the upper-class and separated
pupils from their local community and thus, local dialect
...

Formal tuition also rose as well as several proper usage of language
...
Similarly, somebody may appear very intelligent due to their accent, yet this
perception could be totally wrong
...

Just as Sheridan had wished, soon Received Pronunciation had arose, a mode of speech
employed irrespective of the geographical origins of the speaker
...
Alexander Ellis believed this standard already existed unconsciously and was followed
by those of a higher class
...

Charles Dickens also played upon this difference in accent as seen through the depiction of
his publisher’s wife Mrs Bradbury in his private letters – e
...
‘Wot ave you don with me bed
...
Ellis felt that in Victorian times, it was seen as social suicide to drop an
‘h’
...

Although it is linguistically impossible to speak without an accent, this was seen as a major
attribute of RP
...
Ellis noted, however, that the reality of RP showed an absence of total fixity
ad uniformity and rather, there was a subtle difference between speakers in London
...
He believed that there were pronunciations
of English people more or less educated in a variety of things but not in pronunciation itself
...

The BBC began in 1922 whereby those chosen to present programmes or read the news had
to eradicate all traces of rationality from their speech
...
He was happy
for children to copy the BBC accent as it promoted ‘good’ English
...

RP became the voice of authority and alongside it, the newscasters had to wear dinner
jackets
...
The
BBC’s ulterior motive was that Germans would find it harder to imitate his accent
...
The term BBC English came itself from BBC staff who resented the
better prospects of speakers with public school accents
...
Leonard demands to know why ‘talking right’
should be vested in one mode of speech and not others
...


A series of experiments began to be carried out at this time whereby a ‘matched-guise’
technique was used
...
The audience had to assess the accents on its attributes
...
R came consistently top linked to ‘well-spoken
...
’
However, it lost out to regional accents on ‘friendliness’ ‘generosity’ and ‘sense of humour
...
These adoptive RP
accents retain recognisable regional feature yet are standard versions
...

Audiences in experiments like this believe they have found one form of speech intrinsically
better than others
...
This
suggests that judgement is associative and that we attach certain assumptions to particular
accents
...

An alternative stereotype is the use of a villain with an RP accent in US films
...
The accent is associated with evil
...
Other
intrusive elements are an intrusive ‘r’ between vowel sounds : ‘law and order’, the
shortening of formerly long vowel sounds like ‘off’ and ‘lost’ and the replacement of its with
a glottal stop; - bu
The glottal t was analysed by Anne Fabricius in a situation where two Cambridge graduates
had to read a text aloud and then be interviewed
...
Before
a vowel, only Londoners used /?/ rather than /t/ yet in reading, all widely avoided /?/ before
the pause and vowel
...
It is felt that overtime pre-pausal glottalisation and
prevocalic will become acceptable
...
Native RP refers to language form, whereas construct RP is language
evaluation
...
John Morrish felt R had
become ‘naff and unfashionable
...
Still, there is a

widespread belief by employers that people are poor communicators if they have broad
accents and use non-standard grammar
...
It is a middle ground between RP sands London speech
...
’ It is
possible that RP is disappearing given that it is no longer strictly use in broadcasting
...
Also RP itself has changed a lot over time leading to more
modern incarnations perhaps dismissed as Estuary
...
He feels many
people rid themselves of many regional features but not all and so a lower middle-class
accent emerges
...
Also, most media is based there
...
Third, the South East
accent is spreading outwards just as RP did for centuries
...
This spread signals a trend of ‘accent levelling’ in the UK
...

Geographical aspects such as mobility can change a language because as people move, they
form new social groups with distinct ways of speaking
...

Such mobility is typified by the rise of new towns such as Stevenage and Milton Keynes
which were established as a matter of government policy
...
’ He focused mainly on children as their speech is less fixed, more malleable than
adults and it is them who will have to settle on features characteristic of speech in the new
town
...

Milton Keynes was made in 1969 and by 1991 had 17,330 residents three quarters came
from the South East and nearly half from London
...

The focus was children from three groups – 4 year olds, 8 year olds and 12 year olds and one
carer for each child (usually the mother)
...
They were assessed on elicitation and spontaneous speech
...
But, in fact the children’s accents differed from both aspects as well as
from their mothers’ accents
...
The fact children say ‘li’er and faves’ make them seem cockney
...

The children tended to front their letters a lot more than adults, especially vowels
...
Overall, it seems older girls
have the greatest degree of fronting with the younger ones identical to their carers
...
Looking at
the variable (t) in elicitation tasks, we note the reading task has the highest use of standard
pronunciation
...
This shows older children demonstrate patterns of adult
communities in terms of linguistic variations
...

Today it is harder to tell apart someone from Southampton, Reading and London than it
would have been 30 years ago
...
Some see Estuary English as a means for the
powerful to identify with those they represent
...

Estuary English can be seen as upwards for those aspiring to positions of power or
downwards for the powerful who wish to reassure the electorate that they understand their
problems
...

People feel regional accents are part of us and our local tapestry and it would be boring if
we all spoke with an Essex accent
...
Therefore, even though society is more mobile and open, social symbols and
markers of identity are still as sharply felt as ever
...


Adventures of English Episodes 6 and 7
Jonathan Swift was keen to promote the English language
...
Swift took his case to court in a bid to set up an Academy to control the
language but unfortunately, this came to nothing
...
He even used archive words and got some
meanings wrong
...

John Lough began to decide what words could and could not be used in the English
language
...
Although, this cannot be
controlled as the English itself over time will naturally select what words to keep
...
He felt that without a good grasp on grammar, you would
be destined for a life of agriculture
...
He spread the belief that the best spoken English was pronounced exactly
as it was written
...
Sheridan seized the role as
a national elocutionist
...
He thought that if everybody
spoke in the same way, they would treat each other as equals
...
Then Robert Burns came along making
the Scots proud of their dialect once again as his poems promoted their accent
...

He was reviled for years as he brought English back to the people using simple language,
much to the disgust of Samuel Johnson
...

Thomas Sheridan’s son set his famous play in Bath, a city where you would be ridiculed if
you didn’t speak English properly
...

However, then came along Jane Austin
...
Her usage of England was seen as clean, yet,
many euphemisms arose at this time for the private body parts – penis could be called a
tailpipe, Pilgrim’s staff, Captain Standish, silent flute, pike of pleasure, Milton dagger,

cupid’s torch, chunk stopper, Nimrod, pump handle and Dr Johnson (nobody he wouldn’t
stand up too!)
At this time, Shakespeare had any rude words taken out of it
...
In 1756, James Watt began
working on the steam engine
...
The
Industrial Revolution had arrived! This drove England forward as a nation both commercially
and linguistically
...
This Revolution led to a high level of poverty and the word ‘class’
became used for the first time
...
It was regarded as uncouth to those who had managed to
adopt a non-regionalised accent
...

At this time, Lewis Carroll created Humpty dumpty and brought about English nonsensical
rhyme, where words mean whatever the speaker intends by it and what the listener
understands
...
He also broke a
rule by putting the word ‘bloody’ on the stage – this led to outrage and a lack of being taken
seriously
...

Looking at English Colonialism and the spread of language, India is a major example of a
place where the influence still remains
...
Trade contacts
brought the original words form Sanskrit but it wasn’t until the 17th century when India
began trading with the West
...
Cloth was a major export bringing
words like ‘calico’ and ‘gingham
...
A
dangerous climate arose of British superiority over Indians, with their religion at the
forefront
...

Missionaries arrived and set up English schools
...
The argument was that the local dialects had no terms for legal or technical
jargon
...

This was limited to a higher class in Indian society who could rise as interpreters for the
British
...


Indian English became an ornate form – it was taught by Indians to Indians without any
English influence
...

However, Indian nationalism was slowly taking place
...
Mahatma Gandhi was a key pawn in this
process
...
They brought a
group of convicts with them – soon 150,000 convicts arrived
...

Australian English became shaped by convict settlers who used archive dialect words such
as cobber and digger
...

Sterling became the name for English settlers and currency was people born in Australia to
Englishmen
...
Waltzing Matilda is one
example meaning ‘on the road: It encapsulates a man of Aboriginal and convict English
...
Broad vowels and consonants were seen at the bottom of the scale and RP was
still considered top
...
This
brought about feelings of superiority where local languages were ‘killed off’ completely
...
Less than 1 in 5 now speak Welsh
...

As the Empire faded away, English has had to reach accommodations with other languages
...
English is now seen as part of a
social elite in India
...
Australia’s independence
was only in 1972
...
In the West Indies
independence came in the 1960’s however, English is still used in the schools
...
In a sentence such as ‘the
dog is biting the man,’ we immediately understand who is doing what action due to
position
...

Sentences consist of certain phrases that belong together
...
’ Each verb phrase is made up of a lexical verb where the main semantic content is
housed, and occasionally, an auxiliary verb which adds extra information about the tense or
aspect
...
Thus, each phrase contains just one verb phrase
...
e
...

A noun phrase always contains a headword which controls the concord or agreement with
the verb when in subject position;
e
...
This idiotic team of wasters is playing badly
Other sentences contain indirect objects which cannot be an object
...
g
...
g
...
Unlike the other phrases, adverbial clauses can occupy
several possible positions in a sentence and a sentence can contain more than one of them;
e
...
Typically Mr Bland had arrived in a dress
...
All, elements perform different roles
within the clause
...

Functional grammar began with work by Michael Halliday
...
For example:
Wales beat England last season
England was beaten by Wales last season
...

However, both sentences are describing the same process by the same participants and
therefore, Wales and England are both participants in the beating with Wales being the
actor and England the goal in both sentences
...
Therefore, Standard English is a social dialect – if England had had its
final successful invasion in the North, then perhaps today’s Standard English would be based
on Geordie
...
e
...

The following examples are all standard English but from different parts of the world:
1
...
The plastic is capable to withstand heat – South African puts the verb in its infinitive
form
3
...
He snuck in and burgalarised the place – USA sees a ‘strong’ form of ‘sneak’ instead
of the past tense ‘sneaked’ and a new verb form rather than ‘burgled
...
As well it applies to women – Canadian puts ‘as well’ at the beginning of the
sentence
...
Is it stupid you are? – Irish uses clefting with the verb ‘to be’
...
There are relatively few differences between Standard English in comparison to
the hundreds of regional varieties of Non-standard English
...
It derives features from Chinese
and Malay
...

However it is seen as:
Colloquial Singapore English – used informally by those highly competent in SSE
Lower varieties of SSE – used by less competent speakers such as ‘I got not enough money:
Inter language or developmental varieties – produced by language learners at a beginners’
stage
...


Therefore, it has been banned from TV and adverts
...
This is known as prescriptive
...

The government’s view has made people concerned as it could disadvantage the Singlish
speakers
...
Nevertheless, if educational success depends on the mastery of a
standard variety, surely English’s credentials as a social dialect are under mined
...
We should find least dialect variety among them
...

Gender
In every social class, men use more non-standard forms than women
...

-Women’s use of standard forms represents a desire to be polite and not to offend
From a male point of view:
-Non standard forms are more masculine, tough and rebellious
All speakers, irrespective of gender, use more non-standard forms in a less formal context
...

Age
The use of non-standard forms is high at adolescence moving towards greater use of
standard forms as people grow older before reverting to non-standard forms at an older age
Downs believe this is due to ‘the pressure of different sorts of norms for different age
groups:
At adolescence, peer groups exert great normative pressure on each other than by
institutions of the outside world
...

A study by Eisikovits on 2 groups of males and females of 14 and 16 years showed that the
older girls spoke more Standard English whereas the older boys spoke less
...
The girls also self-corrected
themselves, whereas the boys self-corrected away from the standard
...
Results showed the (66+) frequently used ‘very’ and seldom ‘really’ whereas the 1734 was the complete opposite and (35-65) using half and half
...
In the younger
range (17-34) educated men and women used ‘really’ more than less educated men
...
Less-educated male in both age groups are closest in usage suggesting grater
linguistic continuity
...

These three factors do not totally provide an explanation for the wide variety of linguistic
behaviour in day-to-day speech
...
If we consider
a person that has different social networks outside of work, it is likely that their speech will
alter to accommodate the network they are in
...

A study by Lesley Milroy in Belfast showed that those who had a multiplex network shared
the same speech patterns and non-standard varieties of English, whereas the uniplex
networks spoke more standard due to a variety of different relationships and speech
patterns
...

The following diagram will show that a speaker of a non-standard variety is not using a
totally different system from a standard speaker:

This proves all dialects share a common ground of grammar and vocabulary, yet, they also
have features that distinguish them
...

1
...

3
...

5
...

7
...
’
This is a result of dialect –levelling when various different dialects come into regular contact
with one another
...

Trudgill and Chambers make a distinction between ‘traditional’ dialects spoken in remote
and rural areas of Great Britain and ‘mainstream’ dialects which include standard and
modern non-standard varieties – i
...
‘Hoo inno goin’ for ‘she ain’t going’
...
Nowadays, such difficulties are only
prominent in very isolated areas and usually only among older people
...

Trudgill suggests that new dialect formation has a degree of determinism attached to it
...
When looking at Southern Hemisphere English’s he saw
many similarities as they developed at the same time from similar forms of British dialect
...
He
proposes 3 stages to new-dialect formation:
STAGE 1 – ACCOMODATING
People find themselves in the situation of needing to communicate with a wide circle of
interactants, all with different speech patterns
...
They do this by
eliminating features of speech which are irregular or not shared by the majority
...
The absence of a single model led
them to acquire features from British varieties but in different combinations from those that
pertained in the original dialects
...

STAGE 3 – DRIFT
The first appearance of a distinctive New Zealand English came from those born between
1865-1890
...
He
denotes ‘drift’ as a significant factor in dialect evolution – dialects display a propensity to
evolve along similar lines if they derive from the same source, due to the common structural
properties they inherit
...

Looking at grammatical variety in English dialects will show us that although non-standard
varieties are different due to their own rules, they are still perfectly understood
...

Typically, when Tyneside and Irish has two forms, SBE has three and when it has one, SBE
has two
...
Harris suggests by the 18th

century, simplification of verb systems was advanced in English, yet in dialect, they still
remained
...
e
...
This supports the clean of both drift and the idea that English
dialects tend to reduce the number of form distinctions for an irregular verb to two
...
’ One has to remember when a form is irregular
...
’ Viv Edwards
believes over time, SBE will have simplified forms of past tense for ‘swim’ and ‘drink’ and
that features spread from low status dialects to prestige varieties
...
Ironically, these nonstandard varieties have more rules than Standard English as each ending is regularised
...
Non-standard varieties have not been codified and thus,
its rules can be more regular
...
e
...
’ Interestingly, this corresponds identically with African American English –
enough to say it directly originated this feature from British dialect
...
e
...
Some would say this is
more linguistically deficient tan SE
...

Modal auxiliary verbs also provide us with another difference – the subtle difference
between ‘will’ and ‘shall’ for example
...
Modal verbs are changing quite rapidly –
must now is used in a new context such as making an assumption – ‘you must be knocked
...
Instead, might is commonly found
...
Instead

of ‘shall’, will or ‘ll are used
...

In Standard English, there can only be one modal verb in a sentence, yet in Tyneside, as long
as the second modal is ‘can’ or ‘could,’ it is ok
...
’ Also, in SE certain adverbs are placed before main verbs but after
modals, yet in Tyneside, they can go anywhere – ‘She just can reach the gate
...
’ Finally, Tyneside has a few modal verbs with different meanings to
Standard English so ‘the lift mustn’t be working
...
’ Since the 1990’s, be + like has
expanded considerably especially among university students introducing first person
dialogue
In 1990, be + like was favoured twice as much by women as men, within 2 years, both
genders favoured it equally
...

Tag questions are another aspect prone to variation throughout English dialects
...
However, Scottish English as well as Tyneside and Liverpool use a
double positive such as, ‘Are you still working, are you?’ Another aspect seen in Welsh,
Indian and Malaysian English is to add ‘is it’ or ‘isn’t it’ to the end of a sentence regardless of
the subject
...

Everyone has the ability to develop language suitable for certain purposes yet social and
cultural barriers stop them
...
He suggested that the ways in which an accent varies
across members of society reflect the social organisation of that society
...

He discovered that his upper-class informants pronounced postvocalic /r/ most consistently
and the lower-class least consistently, showing that in New York City, postvocalic /r/ was
associated with high social class and prestige
...
He predicted high levels of ‘prestige’ pronunciation in the
highly formal reading tasks whereas unplanned, conversational speech would show the least
prestige
...

Results were slightly different showing that actual social classes are not homogeneous and
informants will not behave exactly as predicted
...
Labov interpreted this as hypercorrection – this group were aware
of prestige value in their society and were anxious to show it
...

Labov argued that the postvocalic /r/ is spreading
...
The nature of the change is social as each group took
up a feature associated with the class above them
...

Labov also looked at gender and determined that female informants hyper corrected much
more than male informants
...


Chapter 7 – Style Shifting, Codeswitching
The way people talk will differ according to contextual factors, linguistic dimensions and
degree of formality
...
Bell looked at newsreaders in
New Zealand on various different radio stations and how they pronounced /t/ in words like
‘better’ and ‘writer
...

Newsreaders that worked for more than one station converged on a ‘station style’ and
differed their pronunciation
...

Peter Trudgill looked at the same aspect in face – to- face interactions and discovered in
Norwich, a glottal stop is more likely to be used – i
...
‘be’er
...
He
noted more glottal stops were used when speaking to men, proving both sexes use less
standard features when talking to men
...
He found that her
pronunciation mirrored that of her clients, indicating the social class and educational
background of her clients
...
This is known as the accommodation theory
...
She focused
on a change in the interlocutor – formal interview with a white man, formal interview with
same sex black person, informal chat with white student, group discussion and informal chat
with black person
...

1
...
VOWELS /o/ as in /ron (run)
3
...
PLURALS Six car: all di book
5
...
COPULAS Di man happy: John a come
7
...
THIRD PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUN Im put it away
9
...
INFINITIVES John aks fi see it
11
...
Among their black peers, Patois was used a lot more and despite the
informal and formal talk being with the same black person, the groups level of English
changed
...

Looking at a particular informant, Don, who is hostile towards mainstream white society and
whose life centres around the black community, we see his speech with the black field
worker shows
of patois features such as consistent phonology of ‘mi’ and ‘dem’ as well
as ‘fi’ before an infinitive
...
This shows that Don’s language is highly
variable
...
Her English
is marked by a high incidence of Black Country dialect forms such as ‘her’, ‘wor’ ‘cor’ and
‘ay’
...

Jenny Cheshire decided to focus on the speech of young, white working-class speakers in
Reading
...
Cheshire found that young informants used fewer
vernacular features at school than in their local adventure playground
...
e
...

Michael Huspeck worked with a group of lumberjacks in North West USA focusing on their
use of in/ing
...
e
...
He also noticed - ing can be used as a sign
of respect or indeed disrespect for somebody: ‘Hey man, you’re doing real fine!’ – ing is
recognised as a prestige form but the workers’ feelings about such people are ambivalent
and thus, it is not used entirely positively
...
He discovered the males used more creole than the females
and furthermore, they were more critical about white people, thus using creole to define
their identity
...

So far these studies are limited as they provide a simplified model of context
...
These studies only

compare vernacular and prestige which is unidimensional
...
e
...
Also, style cannot be ‘read off’ simply by a certain meaning (i
...
– ing
meaning respect or disrespect) Finally, these studies focus on linguistic features, yet tone of
voice and body language also play a huge part
...
Trudgill’s study into music showed
how many singers try to sound more ‘American’ whereas folk singers sound more rural and
reggae more Jamaican
...
He also noted that with the rise
of punk, low prestige Southern English was used alongside ‘American’ pronunciations
showing a conflict between two styles
...
This is known as slanging and includes the nonprevocalic /r/ and /t/ replaced by /d/
...
He is the typification of the vernacular
Cardiff voice
...
The dialect permeates much of the
performance and imbues it with regional significance
...

Interpreting his speech, we can see that although he generally speaks Non-Standard, /ou/ is
the only uniformly ‘non-standard’ aspect
...
He uses more RP features in connection with structuring and publicising
the show when ‘competence’ is a salient aspect
...
e
...
Hennessy is not limited
between RP and Cardiff English -0 he adopts Americanism such as ‘yeah’ as well as South
West dialect features when mentioning Dorset and cockney for Joe Brown and his Bruvvers
...
Also social meaning changes – when talking about himself,
he conveys humour through self=-deprecation yet with cultural history, he conjures up
social solidarity
...
We only identify contextual type by virtue of his stylistic attributes
...
Rather than just representing Cardiff, he
opens up a range of identities and diverse bases on which he can relate to his audience
...

For many multilingual speakers, codes switching is a possibility to switch back and forth
between languages, thus capitalising on the associations of each language
...
’
Carol Myers-Scotton conducted a study in Kenya and Zimbabwe and suggested that code
switching shows language codes are indexical of social relationships
...

She looks at markedness –unmarked meaning on expected choice associated with the type
of interaction it occurs in and marked meaning one that is not expected in that context
...
One example was English and Swahili
speaking man in a car repairs establishment
...

Switching as an unmarked choice show bilingual peers switching despite no change in
settings or topic
...
There is no social significance in the change – in a situation with
an administrator and principal, English and Swahili are mixed alongside Lwidakho
...
This typically encodes solidarity or even more distance out of a desire to
increase one’s own status
...
A
recorded example is a group of office workers – two Kikuyu, one Kisii and one Kalenjin
...
The leader shouts in Swahili and English to get
their attention again
...
They settle on a
code which will be mutually acceptable by switching several times
...
Code switching can therefore be a solution when it is
unclear which identity offers the speaker the most positive evaluation
...

Codes switching allows speakers access to rights and obligations associated with different
social identities
...
e
...

John Gumperz identified destruction between ‘we’ codes and ‘they’ codes
...
However, this is not static and does change
depending on the context
...

Mark Sebba chose to look at a 17 year old of Jamaican parentage, switching from London
English to creole in her conversations
...
The switch also relates to something typically Jamaican – ‘build’ is place
...

In this girl’s story, the switches to creole are the salient parts
...
One needs to establish clear linguistic boundaries between varieties and look at
style quantitatively and codes switching qualitivity
...
But this poses a question about grammar and whether one grammar wins out
...
IN the
Hindi/English, single words from English are switched – Kampani and ejent draw on the
Hindi sound system and plural endings from Hindi are added to them
...
One mode called the Matrix language Frame, states that within any stretch of
codes switching one language can be seen as the main language in which the other is
embedded
...
It
also supplies syntactically relevant morphemes
...

Code switching and borrowing have a link as all languages have borrowed terms which fill a
gap in the matrix language (bais ikeli) yet they also take words that they already have an
equivalent of (town)
...

Rajeshwari Pandharipande conducted research into the way English switched items were
integrated into Marathi grammar
...
In these contexts,

English retains its English form, yet when modernity is less of an issue, English takes on the
Marathi structure
...
Most linguistic features do vary
among social groups as well as stylistically
...

Myer-Scotton’s markedness model showed speakers were aware of patterns of language
use that are unmarked from their experience in similar interactions
...
In doing so, they are being creative and re-establishing this as
‘normal’
...
g
...
Audience design shows it’s not only the person addressed who
affects someone’s speech but others who are involved in the interaction
...
e
...

New theories suggest people converge towards the variety they expect their addressee to
speak, rather than what they are actually speaking
...
g
...
Finally, accommodation may be an artefact i
...
an
interviewee uses high- status language to appear in a particular way
...
However, this conversation also depends on the cooperation of the
participants
...
Speaker change occurs and reoccurs

...
People will take turns which vary in length so a means of identifying when a speaker has
finished is necessary
...
Places where more than one person talks simultaneously are common but do not last long
...
Transitions are commonly made without gap or overlap

...


Transcription is useful to investigate how conversation works more generally
...


Unit 9 – Everyday Talk
‘Conversation is without doubt the foundation stone of the social world
...
What is said in conversation
draws meaning from a vast amount that is left unsaid as it is embedded in past experiences
and shared knowledge
...
It usually
contains inexplicit references, as well as unplanned and overlapping utterances which look
nothing like whole grammatical sentences
...
The function of ‘small talk’ at the beginning of a
conversation can be to bind people together
...
In a meeting situation, this ‘small
talk’ establishes an egalitarian interactional framework, as well as checking if they are ready
to start the meeting
...
This represents solidarity at the closing point of an encounter – speakers express
positive evaluations of their time together
...

Social interactions centre around ‘face’ – any loss of face in a conversation is disruptful and
may need to be repaired by rephrasing
...

Linguists Brown and Levinson looked at conversational politeness
...
‘Negative face’ needs relate to the desire not to be imposed on, supplied by
apologies, hedging expressions and indirect sentences
...

Politeness involves the appropriate use of address and formality, according to a person’s
relationship with you
...
For example, ‘Come on, dear!’ might be suitable for a child or friend but not
to your boss
...

Linguistic knowledge on turn-taking was carried out by Sacks in 1974
...
People have shared
cultural knowledge about the kind of ‘scrip’ used in certain speech events so the content of

each turn can be predicted
...

Also, speakers unconsciously use their grammatical knowledge to respond at the end rather
than in the middle of a grammatical unit
...

Context in a conversation will influence the use of particular words
...
In addition, language creates its own context through
the utterance that has gone before it and the evocation of nuances from our experience of
them in other contexts
...
In English, this is not so clear and can only be worked
out in the terms people use to address each other
...
, Madam) and informal when out and
about (love)
...
A
term such as ‘love’ can also express different things depending on who uses it
...
Terms of
address also have a force which marks or changes a relationship – i
...
when an angry parent
calls a child Elizabeth instead of Liz
...
If they are being called didi (elder sister), the
speaker is calling on them to act like one and advise them
...
We all have our own style of talking traced from our place of origin, class,
age and gender
...
After the meal, the New Yorkers commented on the lively conversation,
whereas the others saw it as frantic
...

Looking at a case study of Aboriginal English, we can see that it is through their indirect style
of verbal interaction that person privacy is experienced
...

Yet, often this is said as a statement, rather than a straight forward question
...
This strategy serves as an invite for the
other person to speak
...

Aborigines rarely make direct requests – they would usually use a question indirectly, so if
they want a lift to town, they might ask, ‘You going to town?’ Similarly, if the person doesn’t
want to give them a lift, they can answer indirectly
...
’
The questioning of a person’s motives is also carried out indirectly through the use of
multifunctional forms
...

Even when expressing opinions, Aborigines maintain privacy
...
If a difference in opinion arises, they tend to
understate their own views
...

In cross-cultural communication, aborigines experience ‘gratuitous concurrence’ where they
simply respond ‘yes’ to a statement to hasten its conclusion, not because they actually
agree
...
This can
cause problems in places like law courts or formal interviews and can lead to serious missunderstandings
...
This is an ongoing issue amongst Aborigine students who feel resentful of the
white students for their direct questioning
...
Researchers have
found that in mixed company, woman talk less than men
...
This could be
down to the fact that they are brought up to occupy a less powerful position in society and
to display deference to men
...

Another idea is that men and women speak differently due to their different gender
subculture socialising as children through play
...
Boys
sorted out arguments straight away through verbal confrontation, whereas girls excluded
others and had protected discussions about other girls
...
But now,
there has been considerable studies into how people ‘perform’ gender as language
...
Their content reflected their gender i
...
their sexual exploits with women:
defining themselves as ‘red-blooded heterosexuals
...

These aspects combine to constitute the formation of an identity
...

A recent study has shown that women compliment more than men and women are
complemented the most
...
This fits with the idea of women being cooperative and
using compliments to build rapport
...
The compliments of
possessions was a distinct male preference for other men
...
Sentences without adjectives
still had very few verbs – like and love accounted for 86%
...
’ followed by the adjective and noun, whereas
men simply said ‘great shoes’ for example
...
’ was only used by women
and almost exclusively to other women
...
However, second language English users may compliment
too infrequently, or in the case of men to men, too much
...
If you told a Samoan that you like their necklace, cultural norms would make
them give it to you
...
Similarly, ‘lovely’ and ‘nice’ have typified themselves as
feminine words, words of a ‘weaker’ type
...
This is how people account for their actions
...

In order to communicate evaluation, narrators step outside the story at particular pouts to
bring in important additional information or to justify their actions
...
Nevertheless, the speech is always
paraphrased and reframed to show ourselves in a particular light
...
In doing this, people can present
someone else idea as their own
...
People that speak various languages and code switch adopt
different persona based on impersonations i
...
a shop manager may be quoted using RP
whereas a difficult customer is linked to creole
...
However, they limit this usage depending on who they are
with
...
We must consider who is writing it, why and what it is about, as
well as who is reading it and what it may mean to them
...
g
...

If we consider a dialogue between two friends, one persuading the other to go clubbing
with her, we see the attempts at persuasion are carefully managed as well as the rejection
...

Eventually she gives up and the topic is changed
...

University home pages are also a persuasive text – they represent the university’s external
face and are trying to attract students
...
e
...
This is known as a multimodal text
...
There is also a flashing globe representing knowledge and a backdrop of
different people (men, women, black, white, young, old) showing the range of students who
study at the OU
...

In regards to political persuasion, it is only in recent years that rhetoric has come to be seen
as a negative thing
...

Cicero was a great Roman orator who drew his ideas from Greek rhetoricians
...

2
...

4
...

6
...

Narration – giving a brief account of the case and attacking the opposition
...

When analysing modern rhetoric, one must consider to what extent the example has been
pre-planned
...


If we were to take a political election leaflet, we can see that your is used to personalise the
message and directly address the person
...
This directly contrasts ‘they’ which refers to the
opposing party and works to distance them from the reader
...
Essentially, they can
use the first person singular or plural, yet, by using the plural, they could do referring to
them and the prime minister, them and their political party, them and the whole country or
them and humanity
...
Yet, if
something goes wrong, it clearly shows where blame lies
...
Plural forms, on the other hand, show a collective responsibility,
which helps when, decisions are tricky
...
However, the individual will not gain credit when things go well
...
Firstly, although addressing his own party, he is acutely aware of his wider
audience, using a mixture of I and we
...
As well as the references to the nation, he uses countless metaphors, contrasts and
repetition
...
He
creates a strong picture of Australian character - ’never cut and run’
...
The audience are made to feel good about their qualities without thinking whether
it is a justified claim
...

Contrasting their values with that of the opposing party is a key way of accentuating their
support
...
’ His two sentences encompass’ this is not the time
...
’
Repetition by lists is popular when addressing live audiences as it sends out signals when to
applaud
...
In a list of three, there is an upward lift in pitch on the
first two items followed by a downward pitch on the last word
...
Fairclough collected data in a corpus from the Labour Party between 1997-99 and he
discovered many words which continually came up, among which included we, welfare,
people, reform, Britain, schools and deliver
...
‘New’
is actually used very selectively in governmental speeches
...
Strikingly, modernisation is
used almost exclusively for the UK whereas ‘reform’ is specific to the EU
...
’ This leads
Hall to wonder if ‘reform’ actually marks the ambiguity and duplicity of New Labour – is
welfare being wound up or actually transformed?
As well as these aspects, one must consider intonation, hand gestures, gaze, body posture
and facial expressions
...
Firstly Bush uses ‘we’ a lot when referring to future
policies and ‘I’ for personal beliefs
...
However, he refers to USA seldom
...

Kerry uses the personal pronoun ‘I’ a lot more
...
Kerry talks directly to his
audience by using ‘you’ a lot as well as lists of three – stronger here/respected
again/responsible leadership
...

Looking at the Indian Prime Minister Jawarharlal Nehru’s speech after Gandhi’s
assassination, we can see how his transcribed speech shows evidence of the influence of
Indian rhetorical traditions
...
’ This manner is in accord with the principle of
‘dhwani’ – ‘use of poetic words to evoke a feeling too deep to be spoken
...

Nehru’s speech follows the principles of Kautiliya
...
He creates a connection
with the masses by sharing their sorrow, yet also warns against communalism, as their
leader
...
Exaltedness is
seen through his exaltation of Gandhi above mortals
...
’ The repetition acclaims Gandhi as the Father of this Nation
...

Lucidity is seen through the simple language in order to read the masses and the use of
Bapu identifies his with the audience
...

Moving on to advertising, we must realise that it depends upon the emotional idea that our
lives are in some way imperfect
...

Looking at a persuasive poster against assembly reforms, we see many persuasive
techniques, including the colour red for danger, structured bullet points, differences in font
and boxes
...

When looking at adverts, there is always a narrator and an ideal reader
...

This reader both understands and agrees with the message being put forward
...
It is a multimodal text with a dominating picture of
a young couple
...
The text also uses various fonts and colours to show different
‘voices’
...

These voices are engaged in a monologue which appears to be part of a dialogue
...
They assume shared
opinions and speak in voices which create an atmosphere of conversation and proximity
...
By
opening the ad with a question, the reader is engaged with the writer, as well as b the use
of ‘you’
...

2
...

4
...
Firstly, the font is large with many words spelt

wrong – this draws attention to it and highlights that perhaps it is dyslexic abuse as one
reason
...

The text has three narrative voices – the abused staff, the omniscient narrator and the
spokesman for the organisations
...
The staff are not the key voice as their speech is
in quotations
...
Perhaps the ‘help us’ line is directed at those who
would never dream of abusing staff
...
If we add a cultural dimension, we see that persuasive texts
represent aspects of society from which they emerge so how we ‘read’ them depends upon
our own context
...
Many preachers embody rhetorical and musical traditions with African roots that
emphasise democratic participation known as ‘call and response
...
King’s speeches are made up of three
part lists, contrasts and repetition i
...
‘I have a dream
...


Language Play in English
Play in child language learning is recognised as important as it allows children to learn the
cultural ways and values of their society
...
Humour can form the social
functions of aggression, rebellion, reconciliation and solidarity
...
We must remember that different values
based on play can be observed in conjunction with others: a rock star or soap star will earn
more than a violinist or theatre performer
...
E
...
The Times crossword carries more prestige than a word search or a Dickens’s
novel carries more prestige than a comic
...

Cook separates language play into three sections: linguistic form, semantics and pragmatics
...
Not all
businesses would deem it suitable to have a playful name – doctors and lawyers see
themselves as professionally above such practise
...

Certain businesses are likely to have more playful names
...
Here, linguistic form is manipulated to
create a word with semantic ambiguity
...
Forget-me-not refers to both the flower and the reason for buying
it and Fleur de Lys gives an exotic sound to the shop
...
Sometimes, the key story is chosen
because it allows prominent word play, rather than because of its importance
...
g
...
This makes the headline memorable through its selfconscious play
...

Traditionally, so-called quality papers have been seen to provide a more complex and
sophisticated form of reading than the popular papers
...
g
...
The headline partially depends on prior knowledge so there is no

guarantee that every reader will understand its full meaning
...
’
‘Bolton still alive but Fulham’s cup run has ceased to be’ takes the reader and text’s shared
reference to the extreme
...

Another headline was ‘The lady is not for turning up’ in reference to The Queen not
attending Charles and Camilla’s wedding
...

Overall, newspapers provide a sense of fun with their headlines through language play
...
Songs can only be
performed and never written down
...
Some songs are quietly forgotten, whereas others live on for
generations
...
Meanings rely on shared
understandings
...

In most cases, a philosophers name is rhymed with another word
...

Semantically, there are patterns in the endless repetition of alcoholic drinks and their
effects pragmatically, cultural norms are inversed as it is highly unlikely for a group of
professors to sing together, let alone about drinking
...

Finally Australian stereotypes are played upon with a man who doesn’t understand culture,
has little command of conventional English and whose main interest is drinking
...

This song contains a number of contributory and interlocking elements
...

Dick Lee is one of Singapore’s best-known singers
...


Firstly, Indian movies are constantly referenced in Dick Lee’s songs, as to Singaporeans, the
exaggerated love scenes are amusing
...
This humour depends heavily on shared experience
...
Even lexical items have developed new meanings – hawker centre refers to
cooked food stalls, coming from the English ‘hawker’ for an ‘itinerant salesman
...
Features include
consonant cluster simplification, palatalization and /o/ as /t/
...
However, it depends a lot on ‘inside’ information
and thus, will only make sense to somebody with cultural contact
...
g
...
Rock and roll initiated this aspect and is responsible for the
spread of English as a world language
...

From the 1970’s onwards, technological advances brought performance to the fore, with an
emphasis on visual and less interest in lyrics
...

Looking at 1950’s Sam Cooke’s ‘A wonderful world
...
Semantically, it
pleads sincerity over cleverness, asserting the singer’s simplicity
...

Yet, at a more complex level, the lyrics alternate between two different value systems – the
public world of school and the private world of love
...
These two opposing
themes come together through language play: ‘But I do know one and one is two
...
It attempts to win over the intellectual ingenuity tat Cooke denies he possesses
...
Harmony through sound patterning continues
throughout: ‘Now I don’t claim to be an A student
...
If so,
others say that this could also be applied to poetry too where the poet had no conscious
awareness of doing certain things
...


Moving onto graffiti, it is clear that it cannot be reliably identified by its language or subject,
but rather by its physical situation and realisation
...

Graffiti is regarded as antisocial and illegal
...
It is usually written illicitly in a communal or public place i
...
bus
shelter, wall, school desk etc
...
Ontologically, it represents non-standard forms
...

A study by Nwoye looks at students in Nigeria who are denied avenues of public expression
...
Frustrated, they use
graffiti as a source of expression
...
Also, they are not painted
over and so, record dialogue since 1980
...
All 3 graffiti are
cohesive and show contributors take a cue from previous messages
...
The creator wanted to elicit a
discussion in a question and answer format
...
Style shift does occur into non-standard Nigerian English
...

Other graffiti referred to love and was depicted by a heart, which universally represents
love
...
This shows that graffiti can
serve to express subgroups opinion which have otherwise been denied
...
They are
between 7-8 words on average, with none less than 2 words or more than 18
...
These clever devices are often
overlooked as graffiti is seen negatively
...
The wit, inventiveness and effectiveness of such criticism
through such irony is striking: Women like simple things (like men)

Passengers are requested not to cross lines (it takes hours to untangle them)
Puns can involve language meaning, playing with sound and playing with appearance
...
The university which never shuts
2
...
Nope! Confused? A university here
Coincidence of form can also enable puns, particularly cross-linguistically
...
Punning is largely ignored in literary criticism
...
Yet they continued
to be used in written texts
...
’ Freud saw puns respectably as he thought they reflected people’s covert
thoughts and motivations
...
He gives her greenery instead and she replies, ‘With fronds like these, who needs
anemones?’ Here, the pun is the point itself and the fictional world is constructed around it
...

Signifiers do not represent events and people but, create them
...
They are seen as creators
of unruliness and disrespect and are associated with the less powerful
Looking at interpersonal play, particularly multimodal emails make topics less formal than
earlier forms of communication
...
Less strict rules of writing
(omitted punctuation, irregular capitals, etc
...
A variety of
voices are used too: work colleague, friend, grumpy cow etc
...
One example of a one-sided conversation
looking for a friend to talk to, constructs an identity for two participants
...

A second example shows a group of students picking up one reference to Andie ‘twitching
...
The apparent threats also add
humour to the conversation
...
g
...
’ Incongruity is used too: ‘I might pop in referring to America and the use of
dots to suggest delayed thought
...

The film I am about to watch shows a series of TV advertisements for domestic electrical
appliances which was shown in the early 1990’s
...
These adverts are so popular
because they take real people in their own homes having spontaneous and unrehearsed
conversations and edit these recordings, to produce short clip
...
It is an example of innovative yet traditional advertising
...
They used an RP speaker reflecting the social structure
of the time
...
These adverts use a wide range of regional accents as they
are associated with warmth and sincerity
...
This gave the
advert a natural, distinctive sound
...
Also, its conversation
overlap gives it an authentic feel
...

The slogan ‘For all your creature comforts,
...
The narrator is Johnny Morris too, who, even if he
isn’t know, captures the old style voice of the BBC
...
The accents appeal
to the ordinary British public who may even feel part of a shared speech community, all with
a common interest in comfort
...
Using actor Craig Charles as a voiceover is interesting as he has a
strong Liverpudlian accent
...


Literacy Practices in English
Written English is organised by standard conventions concerning spelling, punctuation and
the organisation of text into sentences and paragraphs
...
Spoken English has a higher proportion of
Anglo-Saxon words and more repetition of individual words
...
Generally speaking, these grammatical items (such as ‘the’ ‘and’ and
‘he’ maintain their relationship with lexical items and keep the text together
...
Therefore, written text has a higher lexical density
...
It tells its story in nouns,
compared to the spoken language of verbs
...
This can also be down
to the increased usage of the passive tense in written English
...
However, Halliday
still sees spoken English as complex
...

Modal forms are much more common in spoken English where the person speaks directly
and face-to-face using ‘you’, whereas in written English, it is more distant and formal with
impersonal sentences
...
In a chat room, the conversation tends to use non-standard
grammar and pronunciation, ellipsis and one=word utterances
...
Capitals are used for emphasis, emoticons to signal mood and
spellings containing numerals
...
Firstly, the letter shows simple repeated verbal
structures with an average lexical density
...
The initial blessings
in Kannada reflect the formal style of written letters in India, before ‘well’ is used in English
to switch to a chattier, informal style
...

Firstly, someone receiving a letter always looks in the top left corner for the word ‘safe’ in

Sanskrit, informing them that there is no news of death in the letter
...

On a personal level, the use of Kannada is there for Jaya to strengthen her original language
roots and reaffirm her background and relationship with her father through letter-writing
...
A legal agreement,
for example, requires a conscious struggle to decodify and understand unfamiliar rules
...
In one particular email, we see the expressive stretching of a word to
emphasise longing
...
The transcribed Arabic is primarily used for religious and cultural formulae
...

Another study on teenage boys in Australia showed an increase in technology over three
years
...

Nowadays, we live in a print saturated world with streetscapes containing both words and
images which can be read like text
...
Usually the official state signs are taken
the most seriously
...
Firstly, he reads
and interprets the natural signs of his environment, secondly, he reads the rainfall count on
the gauge; and thirdly, he reads the weather charts and map[s on the T
...
All these
activities are combined with numeracy which is embedded within
...
Firstly, a snapshot of a city street can make
us assume we are in an English speaking city
...
Given that these
characters didn’t arrive until 1949, we can estimate the time period too
...
Sometimes, signs in other countries use English symbolically to show foreign
taste and manners
...
Secondly, there is a strong

emphasis on the ‘y’, giving it central place with floral designs
...

Therefore, we can either index the community or symbolise something about the product
by the sign we use
...
We do
need some outside evidence to make this determination
...
\Usually, there is a
legal policy by the authorities as to which language has priority
...
New shopping malls do prefer English
which can be seen as related to the upper-end fashion shops as well as global world
restaurant
...

In Hong Kong, the railway system is also uniform, yet with Chinese as a preference
...
These people are the ones most likely
to be using trains
...
Is street sign English
linked to colonialism and shopping mall English to globalisation? We know there is a
coherent code preference system but we must remember that it doesn’t necessarily reflect
a certain community or ideology
...
In
the extract given, literary practices can indicate which gender is speaking
...
To
organise communication, we tend to have a diary as well as a family calendar or planner
...
These
practices are tied up with social and work activities and are used to maintain and develop
social networks
...

In Philadelphia, it is she bilingual Puerto Rican teenagers that help their parents fill in forms,
acting as literacy mediators
...


Literacy mediators can be seen in India with street typists
...
He also
is there to offer advice
...
Despite being illiterate, she was fluent in 3 languages and was constantly
involved in literacy practices
...
She spoke Xhosa, not depending
on text but rather on opposition and survival
...
Therefore, Winnie
could not communicate effectively
...
Yet the school promoted a literacy that
did not mesh with existing literacy practices in the community
...

Literacy practices can also reflect social historical change
...
1803 only
has a seal imprint to identify the solicitor whereas 1995 has a headed letter, as well as
branch details and contact information and even a personal client number to look up
records
...
In terms of
letter writing conventions, abbreviations were accepted in 1803, as were different ways of
opening and closing a letter, as well as a more personal tone of ‘i’ instead of ‘we
...

Text genres are defined by its medium, its use of English, its content and its relationship
with the reader
...
The 1803 letter is longer due to its long-winded,
personal tone but also as buying a property was much more complex and open to dispute in
the 19th century
...

Literacy practices also depend on meanings people attach to what they do
...
This also sorts and categorises
people in those who can and can’t
...

Firstly, looking at an archetypal ‘bribe’ transaction, a set phase model can usefully be
applied to most bribery cases
...
After initial greetings, a ‘problem’ is presented which usually amounts to a
request for help
...

The next phase is proposal – rewards are discussed and promises made
...

Sometimes, there is an extension phase with future possibilities introduce
...
Judges do not want linguists called to court as an expert because they
feel they can read too much into a conversation
...
The distinctive features of these language events may not be apparent
to participants or casual observers and its analysis can have practical application
...
Language
constructs ‘working relationships’ and social bonds between people which develop through
work
...

When thinking of English at work, we may tend to think of journalists or lawyers, but
actually, English plays a huge part in ‘getting the job done’ in manual and constructional
occupations
...

Secondly, consultations, deliberations as well as instruction and information must take
place
...
On a building site, the
ideational aspect encompasses entities and processes
...
Typically, builders use both language and gestures to
communicate
...
The use of ‘supposed to’ gives the status of a reality that does not but should
exist
...
As
parts of the building have not been made yet, we can see that the builders are expressing a
‘virtual reality’ - = representation of the desired state of affairs
...
This is a key
aspect of work conversations
...
The accompaniment of swearing serves two
purposes – to conform to the macho environment he is in and to surreptitiously direct it at
the other builder who made the mistake in the first place
...

The end of the language use is seen in the written agreement that the builder signs for the
work he has done
...

Moving on, English is now the recognised language of trade and business
...
Extensive research has shown that sometimes, difficulties in comprehension may
arise when people form significantly different cultures are involved
...
When asked
afterwards how it wet, the Japanese man felt that the Australian didn’t explain about his
company and the conditions of trading enough, whereas the Australian felt that the
Japanese man was brief and non-committal, leaving him feeling confused
Although, one could point out the different expectations held as a cultural thing, one must
also consider each speaker’s background to find out more information
...
Therefore, it could be down to his lack of experience
that he wasn’t finally aware of the ‘ground rules’
...
One particular company
made frequent usage of the personal pronoun ‘we’ as well as technical terms and evaluative
language to establish interpersonal relationships
...
English is also used to build a sense of group identity among
participants with diverse cultural backgrounds
...

In written communication, Ulla Connor noticed that some people tend to simplify their
command of English when speaking to less proficient business partners
...
Sophisticated language is
used
...
Other factors influencing the variation are cultural
background, the broker’s own role and his relationships
...
He also code switches

names of fish into Estonian or Norwegian to clarify or create solidarity
...

Sometimes, jobs have specific jargon and vocabulary
...
There are no preliminaries at the
beginning of the conversation as they constantly deal with one another
...
They use acronyms a lot as well as specific, financial vocab –
discretionary range
...

Although many jargon words have now entered the dictionary, many have also been taken
up as ‘loan words’ or ‘borrowings
...
To qualify, people must need a technical discourse as well as common
interests and goals
...
Genres in the workplace include predictable structures,
specialised vocab, grammatical structures and style, as well as a particular role played by the
participants
...
Usually the subordinate initiates it by indicating
that they have some queries
...
The subordinate then acknowledges that they understand e
...

‘okay’
...
The manager’s turns are longer and
contain typical instruction words (imperatives and verbs)
...
Sometimes, the manager will indirectly give instructions – ‘I would do this
...

Now looking at working with the public, we see the extent that professionals talk about
topics in an unclear way to the uninitiated outsider
...
As well as lack of common knowledge, differences in cultural and linguistic
experiences may play a part
...
Many interviewers ignore such
utterances and thus, fail to grasp key points for the candidate
...
When the interviewee has a low level of fluency, the interviewer takes charge and
greatly controls the content and structure of the talk
...
It
begins with whoever picks up the phone as the first speaker
...
Once confirmed the caller talks
fluently, suggesting reading or performing a rehearsed script
...
Usually, the person hangs up quickly
...
The telephone
seller’s script can alienate people as they feel they have a disadvantage, not being able to
prepare in advance as well
...
Between a GP
and a patient due to deference to the perceived status of doctors, patients usually let the
doctor organise and control the encounter
...
This represents a generic framework for cautiously giving one’s own assessment by
eliciting someone else’s viewpoint first
...

Looking at Longman’s research on professional – client interviews, we see that in this case (a
counsellor and unemployed man looking to work again), the counsellor’s job is to elicit the
client’s work preferences, identify his relevant strengths and weaknesses and propose
suitable training
...

In terms of filtering, the client continually expresses doubt about his ability and level of
experience
...

Reformulation can be seen in the counsellor’s written script of the client’s speech
...
This ‘recasting’ makes him more suitable for the form
...
’ The counsellor reformulates the sentence as ‘servicing’ to appear more
technically and professionally competent
...

This reformulation is very important for the counsellor’s professional accountability
...
The

official manual of practice implies that the counsellor’s job is to filter out and reformulate
information whenever necessary
...
The responsibility lies solely with the
counsellor
...

Looking at Halliday’s work, an example of organising language to achieve a purpose is shown
in newspaper reports
...
Generically, the text has a headline and
subheading
...
We also see purpose determined by cultural
expectation
...


Market Forces Speak English
Nowadays, a complex range of new social relationships are developing and that behaviour is
changing as a result
...

Informalisation is a key aspect whereby professional encounters are increasingly likely to
contain informal forms of English
...
Yet, it can also imply the existence of a friendly
relationship that isn’t actually there, thus sounding manipulative
...
This
leads people to feel that they must use English in new ways to ‘sell themselves
...
’
Some markers of informal English are:

...


...


...
g
...
Salespeople realise this and often shorten
their name when introducing themselves to customer
...
Contractions of negatives or auxiliary verbs – increasingly likely to occur in writing
...
Increased use of informal vocabulary – colloquialisms and slang forms in professional
encounters
...
Use of active rather than passive verbs
...
Intonation – different voices for friends/colleagues etc
...
However, it happens
so quickly that if you need to complain, for example, it becomes much harder to do so
...
Formality, on the other hand, can distance people or maintain a
professional relationship
...
It is essential in creating hierarchical relationships
...

Many people have attempted to simplify the language of institutions – a famous example is
Ernest Gower’s book Plain words, which is a guide to bureaucratic English
...
She sees it as moral and class issues where ‘plain English’ is in opposition
to elitism in a society where people do not wish to be addressed in an unintelligible and

pretentious way
...

Sometimes, it is not even necessary for the whole conversation to be informal
...
Ordinary talk crates interpersonal
involvement and meaning, thus, when intimate, informal language is used in the public
domain, one may feel a social solidarity to the person/company
...
There were
discourse markers such as ‘oh’ and ‘right’ and shortening of words such as ‘because’ to ‘coz’
...
’ One could see this as a genuine democratisation of professional
domains or a subtle, implicit way to exercise power
...
Devices of persuasion can be used, such as,
slogans
...
The employee is explicitly told what to say, how to say it, when to
say it and how the client is likely to react
...
’ and the deictic marker establishes a personal link between client and
sales person
...
This is known as the
‘cold-call’
...
This is scripted again but centred more around
turntaking
...

By the second meeting, first name terms are used and pronouns have also shifted to ‘we’ – a
sign of hidden co-optation
...

Looking at an extract from Animal Farm, we can see strong persuasive language
...
g
...
’ There are also generic statements that claim a
universal truth, as well as the present tense to tell the animals how the world is
...

With the increase in multimodal sales, the two channels of communication (speech and
writing) appear in the same text
...
give strong sense of
social values
...
One example is a letter sent out stating that ‘you have won
a prize
...
It says it began
8:05am – it omits the preposition to imply haste and shows how early the company begins
work by printing the time
...
It is validated by a stamp that appears smudged
...

Modern electoral campaigns are now ‘packaged’ to make a particular point
...

Just looking at one government campaign for healthy eating, we see an informal style with
full colour images and alliterative slogans and contractions
...

An advertisement from shopping centre shows border crossing
...
This allows the reader to
imagine themselves or other people there enjoying themselves
...
The cartoon-like structure is associated with childhood
and thus, shows informality
...
It is an informative text, yet by setting it out like an advertisement, the reader
brings different assumptions to the text
...
It also has a
triadic structure – Higher
...
Lower
...

In Singapore, the media is regularly used for public service announcements
...
The first text showing a new shopping Mall manipulates the ‘kampong’ – an icon
of Singapore
...
The characters are using obsolete English words and dressed
in old clothing but people know that real kampongs never would have spoken English
...

The government public information text shows a tour guide on a coach explaining how to
apply for a flat in Singapore
...
The advert is keen to show a multiracial Singapore with clear identifiers of each
race – i
...
skin colour, dress code etc
...
This strip is generally in Standard English with any
Singlish comments used to lighten the tone only
...
This invokes a foreign national identity
...
The other text is convincing people to visit a shopping
mall
...
Gender roles are clearly
distinguished and stereotypes are over exaggerated for clarification
...

There does come a time when consumers reject salespeople and develop skills to deal with
them
...
Junk mail is easily thrown away or deleted straight away as well
...
This is likely to trigger resistance as it could have
social implications as well
...
Readers can no longer be manipulated by language designed
to persuade
...
’
The reader can recognise this cover-up as well as the fact that another phrase was used to
conceal it, thus making them double angry
...
Many places have
an institutionalised script that is used throughout all global branches of the company, so
customers in Dubai, USA and Hong Kong could all be spoken to in the same way
...

This has led to culture becoming a commodity with increasingly market-orientated politics
renaming student’s customers as thy ear worth a certain sum of money to an educational
institute
...


Lexical changes for financial or political reasons has been introduced
...
’ However, we must consider that we
are all promotional subjects – we often have to self-promote in everyday life for shopping to
dating to job interview
...
They increasingly have to act as
businesses competing to sell their products
...
Essentially, he had to ‘sell’ himself
...
He made categorical claims with positive assertion, yet opened with the
subjective modality marker of ‘I believe
...
All sentences convey dynamic action
as well as noteworthy lexical choice
...
Most
social encounters require people to sell themselves, thus producing a profound problem of
authenticity
...

As well as selling a product, one must consider the positioning of the employee and who
they are speaking on behalf of
...

Looking at adjacency pairs, they usually have a preferred response – e
...
an invitation is
answered with acceptance
...


Making Judgements about English
With the launch of talking pictures in 1930, American language spread across the globe
rapidly
...
’ But
the popularity of films continued – PG Wodehouse’s writing shows a fine example of
Edwardian English mixed with American English
...

There are many different kinds of favourable and unfavourable judgements made about
English:
-

Correct or incorrect – grammar, spelling, pronunciation etc
Appropriate or inappropriate – exam answer, interview etc
More or less useful – expressing feelings, communicating meanings
Beautiful or ugly – accents style of speech (jargon)
Socially acceptable or unacceptable
Offensive – swear words, blasphemy, discrimination
Controversial – deliberately avoid certain usages
Jayant Kocher, President of a New Delhi company, felt so strongly about being misquoted
that he wrote into the magazine to complain
...
He was deeply offended at the mistake
...
She believes that language lamenter’s haven’t understood how it works
...
She feels it is the
media’s role to combat prejudice against variation and discourage moans over trivia
...

Describing air-strikes as ‘precision bombing’ is more of a concern
...
The title suggests it is a popular
introduction to grammar, yet Crystal is an academic linguist with a descriptive view on
grammar – he wants to set out rules that people actually follow when speaking English
...
This distinction is clearly
illustrated in the discussion of ‘will’ and ‘shall’ where Crystal compares his own approach
with prescriptive ideas
...
He feels this is not a trivial role
...
He takes little
account of changes in language use or how clearly the message is communicated
...
John Simpson recalls his teacher telling him off for splitting an infinitive, whereas in
his grammar book, Fowler mocked the rule as ‘superstition
...
This is only considered wrong as it breeches human-made rules and conventions
which do vary from place to place and time to time
...
Many define usage for
their own purpose (e
...
BBC) but they have no authority beyond their own walls
...
g
...

Frequency of occurrence plays a huge role in people’s judgements on correctness
...
In dictionaries,
variations are marked with an ‘ALDO’ – e
...
JAIL, also GOAL
...

Sometime, there is conflict within one organisation
...

Another influence on people’s judgement is appeal to authority
...
People question why educated people
should have the authority over which language form to use
...
However, despite apostrophes conveying 4 different meaning in the
sentence ‘My sister’s friend’s investments,’ when spoken it all sounds the same so further
clarification would be needed – ‘A friend of my sister
...
Older handbooks always speak
firmly and unapologetically about what is wrong, whereas newer books mark this with a
‘bullet’, whatever way, the consequences can be severe especially if it comes from
somebody with authority
...
This is the
case in Burk’s treatment of double negatives which effectively ‘cancel each other out
...
Pink Floyd’s ‘We don’t need no
education’ is immediately understood for what it is
...
Many people regard new usage as
straightforward mistakes, calling for correction
...
’ Some would say that these changes aren’t
particularly damaging
...

Blamires fails to realise that a change in language could give us a new useful word or
distinction in meaning
...
Some argue that abandoning a rule of grammar leaves no grammar at all –
‘He followed my husband and I home
...
However, it is not
to say it is wrong and many people would happily accept this sentence
...
The extract is ironic as the
reader who complains defines the sentence as ‘rubbish grammar’ which is a word that
traditionally is not used as an adjective
...
Rather than lack of knowledge, this
can be down to typing errors that the user does not want to go back to and correct
...

Etymology can also determine the correct meaning of English words today
...
Over time, its meaning has simply changed
...
It corrects
‘criteria’ to criterion and ‘algae’ to alga
...

Ian Mayes looks in depth at the difference between ‘alright’ and ‘all right
...
’ He suggests that ‘alright’ came about
as a confusion with already (which is all right) Others believe that ‘alright’ is only used by
writers that aren’t of standing
...
Kingsley Amis abhors its usage too but says that nobody seems to know why it is
so terrible
...

Some linguists seem to treat appropriateness as a substitute for correctness
...
Usually, formal contexts correspond with ‘correct’ in
handbooks
...

Some judgements on English usage say a lot about that person’s social position and
standing
...

A letter written into the Guardian criticising by misspelling words is a common feature used
to convey a person’s pronunciation
...
It was very
common in 19th century novels to indicate speech of the working class with misspellings
...
‘Hard
Spell’ consultant Laura Smith argued that ‘it’s a shorthand way of saying, ‘I am educated,
take me seriously
...
It is interesting that in Britain, bad handwriting is not a sign of a poor
education
...
Language is not mathematical and shouldn’t be
...

Nowadays, lexicographers will base their spellings and definitions on frequency rather than
on a notion of correctness
...
They will usually occur in a longer phrase of predictable combinations
...
Examples
include ‘keep your chin up’ and ‘lose your rag’
...
g
...
In addition, idiom words tend to have partner
words that come together known as a collocation
...
’
Lexicographers use these corpora to gather information on a particular lexical item before
displaying its usage in a concordance line
...

Corpora help look at the three paradigmatic relationship: Synonymy (expressing sameness
e
...
flat/apartment) – this is highly contextual and lexemes may be synonymous in some
contexts but not others, hyponymy (relationship of inclusion – e
...
chair is a hyponym of
furniture) and antonym (opposite of meanings) such as bit/small
...
In Tom Wolfe’s novel, he coins the term ‘fuck patios’ where his characters use
the F-word with no particular meaning at all
...


A key distinction is whether swear words are used with aggressive or hostile intent
...
’ However, complications creep in when
somebody uses an abbreviation aggressively – ‘Eff off!’
Different newspapers have different polices on printing swear words
...
The Guardian feels that asterisks are a cop-out – however, many people believe swear
words are never acceptable and a euphemism enables somebody to tell a story without
offending anyone
...
In the Radio Times, ‘balls’ and ‘crap’ are
left in, yet a*** is blanked out
...
This is reflected in the fact that ‘fuck’ is
openly used in Scottish novels without meaning its actual meaning
...
Whereas 50 years ago, one could call a black
person a nigger, it is now highly unacceptable
...
Other examples are using black and Asian as nouns instead of
adjectives
...
Words such as ‘cripple’ or ‘slow’ can
no longer be used as it highlights the person’s disability
For swear words, what they relate to constitutes their offensiveness – sexual words for
example, excretion and religion
...
Overall, when used for deliberate abuse, these words become offensive
...
Some feel it is the intention that matters, not the
actual word
...
It wasn’t until the middle class
suddenly decided to distinguish itself from the lower class that the need for ‘moral
leadership’ occurred and all forms of bad language were shunned
...

I feel attitudes have changed in recent years and swearing has become more acceptable
...
For
me, it is a worry
...


English as a First Language
The k knowledge that young language learners must acquire to speak English includes:
-

20 vowels and 24 consonants of a spoken dialect of language and over 300 ways they
combine in sequence
...

At least a thousand aspects of grammatical construction governing sentence and word
formation
Hundreds of ways to use prosodic features of pitch, loudness, speed and rhythm
A large number of roles governing the ways in which sentences can be combined into
spoken discourse
...

A large number of strategies concerning how rules can be bent or broken in order to achieve
an effect
...
By the time they reach school, children
have assimilated at least three quarters of all the grammar there is to learn
...
They lean
language in social situations, where they, and other people, are trying to get things done
...
She reproduces several of the phrases very accurately – both the
wolf’s words and the storyteller’s style
...
It gives a clear idea how her parents musts have told the story
...
This shows she has learnt the events of the story off by heart but it is largely her
own grammar stringing it together
...
She has a preference for linking sentences with ‘and’
– the commonest linking word for children
...

Halliday was the first to suggest that a functional approach to the development of meanings
implies a social foundation for the development of language
...

During their first year of life, infants produce a range of sounds and begin to indulge in vocal
play:
MILESTONE

AVERAGE AGE

Eyes open

0

Eye to eye contact

2

Social smile

2

Coos and goos

2

Laughs

4

Squeal/yells/raspberries

4

Canonical babbling

7

Comprehends a word

9

Comprehends 10 words

10
...
When infants acquire
control over their sound-making equipment, they are taking control of a system which will
later be useful in communicative exchange
...


There is no clear agreement among researchers on whether early sounds made by children
are universally the same
...
In contrast, others claim
that infants only have the ability to cry and rely on their environment to provide sounds to
lean and copy
...

Levitt and Aydelott Utman carried out a study on a US and French baby to assess sounds
produced by each of them
...
If the language environment
influences the infant, different sounds will be produced
...

The study showed similar developmental patterns and of the influence of adult language
...
But after 11 months, effects
specific to the language environment became apparent – phonetic inventory began
resembling that of an adult
...
l
...


Research shows that infants are very good at identifying features of a specific language,
differentiating one from another and indeed, recognising characteristics of specific
speakers
...
Many
care giving routines, such as bathing and feeding, provide predictable exchanges involving
language
...
One example is ‘peek-k-boo’ where question and
reply sequence is repeated several times until adult say BOO!
Peek-a-boo is determined as a proto conversation
...

This sort of interaction introduces children to many of the formal characteristics of
conversations long before they are able to speak
...

A common observation is that when an adult speaks to a child, they modify their speech –
higher pitch, exaggerated intonation and a slower delivery
...

Known as ‘child directed speech’ (CDS), it plays an essential role in language acquisition
...

Pye studied the Quiche people of Central America and noticed that they do not modify their
speech as Western care givers do
...
Despite this variation, Quiche children grow
up as fluent speakers of their mother tongue
...

This proves that these Western exchanges are not universal, nor are they a necessary
feature of early language experience
...

When a child produces its first word, the question is raised as to what actually counts as a
word
...
In this case, any sound produced by an infant
regularly and recognised by the care giver could be classed as a word, although it could be
unrecognisable outside that specific context
...
But from around 21 months, the child may acquire 10 new words a
week
...
g
...
Clearly, this vocabulary consists of thins
relevant to the child’s life
...
Secondly, the child’s aim is to
communicate and these concrete words do just that
...

In the early stage of development, it takes longer to acquire words in production than in
comprehension
...
g
...
g
...

By 13 months, they can carry out commands that contain relational information between a
direct and indirect object – ‘give mummy a biscuit
...
After

comparing a child’s first 50 understood words and first 50 produced, Benedict noticed both
vocabularies containing words from several classes
...
Regarding differences, action words prevailed more in comprehension,
particularly object-related (give) or locative action (come here)
...
Although production can be too, word
accompanies rather than trigger a response
...

Infants overextend words in comprehension as well as production
...
’ and pointed at the three objects
...

Another investigation involved tracking comprehension of unknown word overtime
...
They were then assessed to
see it they would carry out the particular action or grab the particular object
...

Another approach is how infants understand meaning by word order
...
Using two videos of
different scenes and assessing whether children looked at the correct one, it seemed 16-18
month old are most likely to get it right
...
g
...

The primary care giver and those around the child can impact their development of
vocabulary
...
Barret looked at the first 10 words produced by children and assessed whether
their use was linked to the most frequent maternal use of the same term
...
5%) showing
that linguistic input can really aid lexical development as children derive their use of a word
from its most frequent use in their environment
...
g
...
This tends to last until they learn the correct names
...
He then used the word to
refer to all objects sharing that property
...

Children can also under extend so the word ‘animal’ is typically only applied to mammals
first
...

After looking at the child’s usage of the same words, the link between it and its maternal
example was greatly weakened (58-6%) suggesting children rapidly move on and begin to
deploy their new linguistic resources on the basis of their own understanding
...
Crystal has
identified several stages of grammatical development:
- The earliest stage consists of one word long utterances
...
This occurs between 12-18 months and is known as a holophrastic
stage
...
This
occurs between 18 months – 2 years
...
This takes up much of the third year
...
‘And’ is a key word at this stage
...

- Around 4 years, children do a great deal of ‘sorting out’ their grammar – they learn
irregular forms and pronouns which take a year to perfect
...

Telegraphic speech is used to describe children in the second stage
...
Even children’s imitation of adult’s
speech becomes telegraphic – ‘I am playing with the dog’ becomes ‘I play dog’
...
It seems that the child’s answer
stems from scanning the sentence and abstracting the crucial elements of meaning even
though he cannot duplicate its production
...
’ They would not have heard an
adult say this proving that these cannot be ‘imitations
...

To understand a child’s communicative competence, we need access to the utterance’s
contexts
...

Each utterance can have several potential grammatical expansions, depending on
contextual clues:
Car go vroom! – all cars, this car, it went vroom
...
Tense and aspect are key for this in English
...

- First, irregular verbs in the past tense appear – sleep and slept, for example, are both used
correctly

- Then past tense of regular verbs appears – now, all past references will use inflections
even irregular ones that were correct before – sleeped/comed/goed
...
It seems that children locate the event referred to and ten continue
in the present tense
...
When children begin using the regular
past tense whey have discovered the range of words available b adding –ed, yet, they do
not immediately notice the exceptions
...
The rules they apply are sensible and plausible but incorrect
...

It now becomes necessary to distinguish between sound and phonemes
...

The phoneme must therefore be viewed as an abstraction
...
We must look at phonetics to
understand further
...
To say bottle is
made up of phonemes /botl/ is a phonological statement, whereas, explaining that in RP the
word sounds like (bbtl) and in London English (bo>u) is a phonetic statement
...
Take the example of /p/ - depending on where it occurs in a word it is
more or less implosive
...


Any vowel from any language can be positioned in this chart
...
Playing with objects combined with
pretence builds imaginative thinking
...

Vygotsky realised that rules appeared in imaginative play that the child derived
unconsciously from observations of real life behaviour
...
He also noticed that many play
practices are indicative of skills that the child will develop in ‘real life’ in the future
...

Now considering older children, their grammatical skills still develop as they create more
complex constructions that they see in books/magazines etc
...

Anne Anderson has investigated how new information is introduced into a dialogue
...

Major interest was in when her new information was introduced in a question form as
opposed to a statement
...
Children only become aware of the interactional aspects of communication as
they grow older
...
The infrequently seek the listener’s
involvement
...

Children learning to develop storytelling and narrative skills will need to be able to organise
material in such a way as to preserve a sequence, explain motives and purposes and
maintain the listener’s interest
...
Jokes are a way of manipulating our listener’s expectations in a way that
makes the punch line a violation of those expectations
...

With a story, speaker need to be aware of what a listener already knows and what they can
be expected to know on the basis of their shred cultural knowledge
...


A study by Kelly saw joke making in children occur in four stages:
1
...
This allowed her to explore the boundaries of the concept represented by
the word
...
Games based on phonetic patterns – ‘Cow goes moo, mummy goes mamoo and daddy does
dadooo
...

3
...

4
...
e
...
Similar to stage 4 yet the joke was set up a linguistically misleading context
...

When children go to school, their humour develops more, although for a whole, they do
explain jokes afterwards to ensure they have been understood
...


English in the Repertoire
When children have two or more languages at their disposal they can use a particular
variety to express a certain affect
...
This shows a statement about how she relates to her mother and her culture
...
He then reverts to his ‘ordinary’ voice to reestablish a more equal relationship
...

Of course, relying on a written transcript, too much could have been read into each of these
situations
...
Kamwangamalu has described this as:
Who am I? How am I perceived by others? How would I want to be perceived?
Language acquisition is typically a matter of learning the rules of social behaviour and only
later a matter of learning the grammatical rules by which they are realised
...

Rashid, a Malay boy, talks of his English – speaking upbringing at both home and school
...
He went on to become a school debater and
held his own
...
They are ‘co-operative conversationalists and their language
learning evolves from this
...
A study by Bruce Heath of a poor,
black community in the USA showed that children were told to be as un-cooperative as
possible when talking to strangers
...
In the
1970’s Hymes denied this stating that performance is itself rule-governed and speakers
need to acquire skills like when to speak and in whole variety etc
...

Looking at one particular case study of Sylvia Rojas-Drummond and Hugh Drummond, they
chose to bring up their two boys bilingual in both Spanish and English
...

Both children are 9 and attend a bilingual school
...
However, they have tended to be monolingual speakers of
each language, changing in response to their social and linguistic circumstances
...
They live in Mexico from 0-3;1, then Oxford
from 3;1-4;1, then back to Mexico
...

They did understand him but usually answered in Spanish apart from a few hesitant words
...
This changed radically when they
were 3
...
Within weeks, both boys spoke English nearly as fluently as Spanish
...
This was
accompanied by an unwillingness to speak Spanish and a request for Sylvia to not speak it at
nursery
...

When tested by translating a simple English sentence to Spanish, the boys simply couldn’t
do it! They still understood Spanish but found it increasingly difficult to converse in it
...
Over a few weeks, the children began responding to Sylvia in
Spanish again and their strong accents disappeared
...
They
continued speaking English to each other for up to seven months and then suddenly, they
switched to Spanish and never changed back!
Soon, they developed a capacity to switch languages according to context or social groups’
Both languages do tend to influence the other in some ways –o some are phonetically
pronunciations, others are morphological such as the invention of ‘superba’ or ‘atachado’,
and others are syntactic such as English word order o- ‘los azules zapatos
...
Recently, when reading in English to Hugh, Alan would turn to Sylvia and recap the
events in Spanish accurately
...

A monolingual baby leans how to talk at the same as learning to distinguish sounds and
learns to make sense of language at the same time as learning its rules
...
Much research has been done on
whether the baby separates these two language systems or not
...
Celce-Murcia’s daughter at 2;4 said the French ‘couteau’ and English
‘spoon’ instead of the harder ‘knife’ and ‘cuiller’
...

The gradual development of two vocabularies goes hand in hand with the growing
awareness of the different semantic coverage of the two languages
...

A major task for a bilingual child consists in learning which contrasts are significant in
making meaning and how these rules can be generalised across both languages
...
Aspects that are specific to one language
(gender and verb tenses) will need to be ‘flagged’ specifically
...
Young children are usually able to articulate clusters of words in English as they
can retain brief stretches of speech in their short-term memory
...
Examples like
‘come on’ and ‘don’t do that’ are socially embedded and therefore, highly memorable
...

Inappropriate features of a first language can run into the second e
...
‘foreign’ accent or an
idiom, however, sometimes this is difficult to state as errors can resemble the
developmental stages of first language learning
...
This is known as ‘process

transfer
...
’
Languages will differ in the extent to which they share common features with English
...

Age is a significant factor and much depends on the learner’s sense of identity with their
first language and their attitude towards English
...

In societies where English functions alongside another language, there may be an elaborate
pattern of appropriateness which dictates the choice of a language according to a particular
context
...
A child must learn which language to use to create a particular effect
...

A child can manipulate these rules to achieve personal goals
...
Ioan then
switches to Welsh to tell his mum he doesn’t want to go to bed
...
In Myers-Scotton’s study, a Hungarian boy wants to make lemonade by himself but
ends up s[pilling it
...

In another situation, Arabic’s boy switch to English is a mark of defiance and challenges role
relations
...
The children’s other languages deal with
management of play, personal relationships and the home
...
Similarly, Chinese girls
playing schools use Standard English for the teachers and Malay for the students
...
His original hypothesis
was that young children were not sensitive to social invitation in language and they did not
make stylistic choices until early adolescence
...
The middle-class boy began speaking more Standard
English and the working-class boy speaking more Trinidadian English, already disproving
Labov’s assumption of increasing social awareness would cause an orientation towards
Standard English
...
The middle-class child produced 100% Standard English past tense forms
with her mother and less with other family members and helpers; the middle-class boy
differentiated between ‘talking nice’ and varied his talk stylistically depending on his
addressee
...

Reid did a similar study in Edinburgh and concluded that features of each child’s speech
related systematically to their social status and the context in which it was produced
...
This is similar to an observation in
Romance’s study where ‘watching one’s speech’ is done to make a good impression of the
family and to not seem rough
...
She noted that
all children spoke in different ways to different people: infants are very selective, 4 year olds
whine at their mother, verbally play with their peers and reserve narrative tales for other
grown-ups, whereas 8 year olds can use formal adult speech, CDS and socialisation with
younger children
...
Heath’s study of a poor black community showed that children could mimic the
adult style of firing questions very well
...
She recognised he used questions in a different way to
her community and likewise, she refused to answer them
...
’
Due to their lack of social power, children can get it wrong – a younger child can try to boss
around an older one
...
Children seem to be
sensitive to the effect of ‘please’; however, they also use indirect means to get what they
want
...
Evidence shows that girls revert to more indirect language quite quickly
...

Certain interactional features like interruptions are associated more with boys, whereas,
indirect requests are associated with girls
...

When girls become adolescent, they typically adopt more standard varieties of speech than
their male counterparts
...

The perception of vernacular English as more ‘masculine’ does start at an early age but does
seem to hold true as boys growingly identify with men in the community
...

Boys also tend to self-correct away from the standard and girls self-correct towards it
...
They believe the identity of a
group lies in the projections that individuals make of the concepts each has about the
group
...
Their linguistic identity had become relatively fixed
...

So, in contrary to Labov’s hypotheses, children become less flexible around puberty and
more conscious of a particular set of identifications
...

So, young speakers can:
- Unconsciously adopt the speech of others because they identify with it
- Consciously emulate the speech of groups they wish to impress
- Consciously mimic the speech of others while also distancing themselves from the
stereotype
All of these acts of social positioning can be accomplished at various levels, through sound,
grammar, vocabulary or discourse patterns
...
Sometimes these identities support one another and
sometimes they are in conflict
...


Unit 19 – Learning to Read and Write in English
Children’s understanding of ‘environmental print’ is seen as an important route to literacy
...

In an environment of written texts, children will use many strategies to work out what
adults are doing and they will attempt to join the adult literate world in different ways
...

This discovery is termed as ‘emergent’ literacy
...
Many
associate reading with talking and with running the finger along a line of print
...
Both ideas are very much influenced by models at home
and conversations adults have had with them about reading
...

Many interactions with print will happen in combination with different types of talk
...
Some activities will be
compulsory (tax forms), others associated with family members (Grandpa does crosswords)
and some may have restricted access (a letter in another language)
...
This makes children learn about
family life and reading and writing’s purposes too
...

Each child will acquire a personal history of interactions with different language varieties,
speakers, readers and writers
...

Brice Heath’s classic ethnographic study changed the typical belief on literary practices
among children in close communities
...

In the middle-class community, children learnt about literacy in an environment filled with
print
...
They leant rules about book reading – the types of questions to ask and
the fact that interruptions are allowed
...


In the working-class community, books also played a central role in children’s lives
...
Book reading was far less interactive and the world
of books entered far less into ‘real life’
...
Language opportunities came from oral
narratives and adult talk
...

The types of contrasts reflect the range of possible interactions under a label such as
‘reading a book’
...

For the Philadelphia children, reading and writing were seen as important for selfexpression, for learning and telling others about their world and for social transactions
among friends and adults
...
Parents discouraged literacy at home
...
The acquisition of functional literacy in English was a priority but their involvement for
personal expression or enjoyment was not evident
...

The writing that goes on in the formative pre-school years does not consist of unstructured
doodles; rather, it provides evidence of children’s search for the principles underlying the
adult system
...

Adults learn to filter out much of the print that surrounds them and unconsciously
categorise symbols into different sorts of writing
...
Children need to work out each part’s meaning and place in the adult system
...

A 2 year old child may recognise his age and begin associating it with other things – he may
even know it can be indicated as a digit
...
Despite his considerable cultural knowledge of ‘two’, his understanding of it as a
mathematical symbol was emergent
...

Examples of children’s early writing illustrate the possibilities that children explore
...

Another child was adamant that his Chinese characters were real – after learning about the
Chinese New Year at school, he drew ‘made-up’ characters in one of his pictures
...
Every convention of language users
worldwide has been reinvented and tested
...

Downing looked at whether literacy is easier or harder to acquire in English than in other
languages
...
The principles involve: symbols should represent meaning and symbols should
represent sound
...
e
...
e
...

It is often thought that Chinese is harder to acquire as the large amount of morphemes
make it difficult to remember them all
...
During initial reading materials,
only syllabic characters are used before later introducing other characters
...
Finish and Polish have a close
relationship between the phonemes and letters
...

English writing is more complex as the combination of symbols often does not bear a direct
relationship with the sounds
...

Another difference is the way that the temporal order of speech relates to its spatial order
...


Also, the design of symbols is different – variants on simple shapes are harder to remember
than more complex ones
...

It seems that Chinese is easier at first for the reader to learn
...
Systems
such as the Japanese syllabic appear easier to read that alphabetic systems
...

Children acquiring literacy in bilingual or multilingual communities are faced with greater
complexity
...
Factors such as religion, age and
schooling influence this lot
...

In Kenner’s study on the aforementioned topic, she noticed some interesting things
...
These bilingual links are an important part of her emotional and
intellectual development
...

Children becoming biliterate find out that different scripts operate in different ways
...
Many children develop an
impressive range of visual and actional capabilities due to this
...

In Chinese, children must show fine pen control from a young age, as well as having the
capability to recognise small differences in stroke patterns
...

In Arabic, the letters take different forms depending on whether they are at the beginning,
middle or end of a word
...
Teachers
provide a join-the-dots model in exercise books which was an aid to perception and action
...
They
recognise a signature as the most personal and self-defining act of writing
...

This learning process involves visual, actional and cognitive learning – known as embodied
knowledge
...

Due to its complex spelling system English is known as a grapheme to phoneme
correspondence system:
1
...

2
...


3
...

The idea that we read English logographically is seen with such words as Mrs or St which we
never try to represent pronunciation
...
’ Reading happens as children
approach it with the assumption that it is going to make sense and that they can work out
the sense by using what they know about spoken language
...
g
...

Children initially rely on their sense to tell them the ‘truth’ about the world
...
A text example of a boy’s work
shows incorrect spellings of ‘their,’ ‘little’ and ‘nothing’
...
In terms of the truth of meaning, he produces a semantic transcription
rather than phonetic when saying ‘frog’s spawn’
...
This
leads to her transcription and spelling in a particular way
...

A longstanding argument has been whether children should learn with specially designed
reading books or ‘real books
...
During
development, English- speaking children must learn to read not only regular words with
systematic grapheme-phoneme correspondences but also ‘exception’ words that do not
conform to such rules
...

Descriptions of the sources from which successful reading and writing derives are known as
‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down
...

Regarding bottom-up, Gough argued that the fundamental challenge comes in decoding –
converting the characters to phonemes
...
Skill in phonics gives children a
valuable means of data collection about the writing system
...

Secondly, the perception of words depends on the syntactic environment in which we
encounter them
...


Regarding top-down, it is linked to ‘guessing’ and a direct parallel between the learning of
spoken and written language
...
There is a strong emphasis on the non-visual information that
the reader brings to a text- readers can identify meaning without the identification of
individual words
...
Adams argues that readers do not skip over words but rather have the ability
to identify them quickly
...
’ Stanovich argues that fluent
reading is an interactive process where information is used from several knowledge sources
simultaneously with various component sub skills cooperating in a compensatory manner
...
This has become the general model in
literacy education
...
He attributed this to the fact that:
-Children become familiar with the rhythms and structures of written texts
- They extend the range of their experience and discover the symbolic potential of language
-Stories provide an excellent context to talk to adults
...
In the USA, some parents saw reading as ‘work’
or a ‘female activity
...
Eva Gregory’s
research showed that you cannot take one cultural context and assume it will remain the
same in a new context – at home, a story is to enjoy together, whereas at school, it is to
teach
...

With synthetic phonics, emphasis is placed on recognising individual letters and blending
them to form words: whereas, with analytic phonics, the focus is on the recurrent patterns
at the level of the syllable, allowing the learner to focus on the phonic element that varies
...
In a word like cat, c – is the onset and -at the rime
...

Initial consonants show the highest levels of consistency in how they map onto the same
sounds
...
Vowels are not good as they do not
systematically represent the same sounds
...
They must learn how using English is applied at school – unfamiliar education conventions
and technical language of curriculum subjects
...
They must learn to speak and write in English if they have grown up speaking another
language or use Standard English as oppose to non-standard
...
They must learn how written English differs from spoken and how a text is constructed
...
Talk is also used to provide children with certain kinds
of information that would be hard to provide by other means – telling stories, reading
poetry etc
...

The essence of formal education is that a teacher helps another person to learn to do things
that would not be easily leant without help
...

One way to describe a teacher is someone who guides their pupils into active participation
in educated discourse
...

Language is crucial in bonding teachers and leaner’s on what they have done, what they are
doing and what they’ll do next
...

All children must learn how English is used in school if they are to participate fully in the
educational process
...
The conversation usually follows a structural pattern of a teacher’s question followed
by a pupil response, followed by some teacher feedback
...
This is an archetypal form of interaction between a teacher and pupil
...
Sometimes, IRF
exchanges are more complex when there are several responses to an initiation or the
feedback also functions as further initiations
...
Usually, a ‘closed’ question is asked which the teacher already knows the answer to
...
This IRF exchange is the most common in a classroom
...
They are unlikely to consolidate their understanding
without the teacher’s elicitations to prompt them
...

Comparing these two sequences, we can see that in sequence 1, the questions asked are
open as she does not know the answer and has more than one correct answer in mind
...
Her enquires
serve to assess her pupil’s learning and guide their future activity
...
In these exchanges, language structures have
more than one purpose and function according to the context they are used in
...
Generally, the IRF routine is learnt quickly by
children, yet, sometimes according to a particular cultural context, the familiarity of this
sequence is not known
...
As they failed to perform their appointed roles, the teacher engaged in an
ongoing attempt at repair and revision of her intended pattern
...

The children’s reluctance was not down to a lack of fluency in English but rather, due to
their cultural upbringing of interrogations and demonstrations being considered impolite
...

Research in USA and Mexico on Native Americans also showed that IRF patterns were
discomforting and alien to them
...

Schools normally fail to incorporate the language practices that childfree have developed in
their home communities – e
...
story telling of Irish travellers
...
However, adopting this into the classroom may not always be
welcomed by the child
...
It appeared to mix both traditional Indian teaching styles with 19th century Victorian
methods
...
The roots of this arrangement are in both Harikatha (an Indian story

telling tradition where the audience can clearly see the performers and Gurukula (a link
back to ancient times when a guru sat under a tree with his pupils in rows in front to
acknowledge his authority)
...
A paragraph was read, and
then explained, before a final question and answers session at the end of the text
...
This allowed no
disruption when the class switched teachers as pupils knew what to expect
...
They like a teacher to bring their own individuality and
flavour to a text
...
The ability to use several different terms to convey the same sense
has always been considered a mark of intelligence in India
...
It is interesting that his Sanskrit
actually contains mistakes, yet it still serves to impress the children
...

Both teachers set up rhetorical questions to convey their sense of authority and maintain
control over the class
...
So how do they know when to answer? What seems to happen is
that the pupils remain quiet, forcing the teacher to continue until they are satisfied and
show this understanding by responding to a question
...

By answering questions, the children show that they have been paying attention
...

The students do not have the freedom to initiate talk that may lead to interesting
discussions
...

Becoming familiar with the language of a subject is an important requirement for entering a
particular intellectual community
...

Technical language in the classroom can cause much confusion as children are reluctant to
ask a word’s meaning as they don’t want to seem ignorant
...


Children who are learning English as a second language have an even harder time as
sometimes, their teachers are not able to competently explain scientific words, resulting in a
slight change of definition
...

In many countries, it is common for activities to be set up in which pupils work and talk
together without the teacher
...
Typically, the children make extended contributions and expand on
each other’s comments
...
Talk is used to share knowledge and construct joint understandings
through the similar status of interactants
...
They must talk about a task successfully without
the teacher’s guidance, yet they are still expected to use language in an educationally
appropriate way
...

In their IRF model, Sinclair and Coulthard identified a hierarchical organisation
...
’ They also identified four typical exchanges known as directive,
check, informative and elicitative
...

If we consider teaching English to pupils who do not have it as their first language, the role
of the teacher is to teach the English language, its educational ground rules and any specific
subject content
...

For some pupils, these demands can be complicated because the teacher is getting them to
focus on both the medium and message
...
This is seen as
controversial – some say it is a sensible response to the situation yet others disagree
...
Johnson
and Lee noted that it follows a three part structure:
1
...
Explanation and clarification in other language
3
...


A study by Camilleri at English and Maltese in Malta classrooms shows code switching used
in a different way
...
Two
parallel discourse are created – the written one in English and the spoken in Maltese
...
The teacher tended to initiate all conversations in English, pupils respond
in Spanish if related to other children and feedback was given in both languages depending
on the activity
...

The behaviour of teachers and pupils in school in regards to English will usually depend on
the official education policy of language use
...
It is a difficult process for a country to decide whether
to adopt English as a classroom language – it is usually down to government policies and can
change according to parental demand (i
...
Wales)
Another difficult situation is the encouragement of native English speakers to use standard
varieties in the classroom
...
However, others worry about the effects that a devaluation of regional
English may have on the self-esteem of pupils
...
Children must learn such complexities as the use of nominal forms – the
betrayal of Macbeth
...
g
...

These rules are actually rarely taught by teachers and tend to be inferred from what they
say, do or feedback instead
...
Process writing concentrates on the processes
engaged in by students as writers in order to produce their written work
...

Ownership of the writing is retained through topic choice and personal voice, with the
teacher’s role as a supportive adviser
...

An alternative approach to the study and teaching of writing, based on work by Halliday, is
known as genre approach
...
Genres
encode knowledge and relationships in certain ways through the use of different language
structures
...

Denying people access to genres means denying access to the subject, argue the founders of
the genre
...
Its criticisms include; the encouragement of teaching narrowly defined models for
specific kinds of text; it supports an uncritical view of how established, powerful groups use
English; and leaning ‘powerful’ ways of using English does not necessarily give the user
access to power
...
Genre may actually vary among
countries or cultures too as conventional expectations of what counts as a story may differ,
for example
...
Sometimes, it is hard to work out
whether a child is struggling with English or the ‘local’ ground rules
...
A study by Moore on non-native
English speakers in English schools found that Mashud, a Bangladeshi boy, wrote
enthusiastically in English, yet all his creative writing assignments were based on heavily
formulaic fairy tale moral tales
...
This proved the large gap between what
Mashud was brought up to value and what he has been told to value at school
...
This led to specific activities
designed to see Mashud’s capabilities and the results were positive, showing he further
grasped the genres of English expected of him
...


English in the Curriculum
Mass education in the UK began with The Elementary Education Act of 1870 providing basic
education to children up to age 10
...
However, English was
initially limited in scope to a very basic form of literacy
...

In the 18th century, there were those who saw literacy as a necessary evil to ensure a
moderately literate workforce and a threat to the established social order
...
This tension
between a utilitarian and a libertarian notion of literacy still exists today
...
Others see it as including multimodal texts
...

We also need to consider the social context in which literacy is practised
...
This requires those that
design the curriculum to think about variation in meanings and uses that students bring
from their home backgrounds
...
The horizontal axis
shows the relationship between individual needs and collective needs
...
This needs
to be imposed by the state through an official curriculum
...

English as a great literary tradition represents a model in which an elite imposes a canon of
great literature
...

English for personal growth emphasises personal growth brought about through individual
creativity
...

English for critical literacy represents the socially constructed nature of the subject being
revealed through engaging in debate about texts
...

The first UK government report on the teaching of English, the Newbolt Report (19221)
identified its role as straining in the sounded speech of standard English to ensure correct
pronunciation: in the use of SE to secure correctness in oral and written expression and in
reading
...
The Report felt it
was the duty of teachers to fight against the ‘evil habits of speech contracted in home and
street
...
He urged newly settled immigrants to speak English at home
...

Official curriculum statements also contain broad statements of purpose that tell us how the
subject is viewed at an official level
...

In Scotland, there is a focus on cultural and linguistic diversity in the country, which
recognises that many students are bilingual and growing up in a world marked by increased
diversity and interdependence
...


Concerns about UK reading standards in the mid 1970’s led to the setting up of a committee
of Inquiry which led the Bullock Report of 1975
...
They also agreed that no one method can be used to teach reading
...
This involved a daily
‘Literacy Hour’
...
Teachers reacted negatively feeling that if one focused on an extract rather
than the whole book, students would not be able to make a whole response to it
...
However, Hilton argues that
the tests got easier due to an increase in the number of literal information retrieval
questions and a decrease in higher-older inferential reading skills
...

A 2003 study called ‘Progress in International Reading and Literacy’ marked students in
England as 3rd out of the 35 countries involved
...
Girls count for 75% and boys 55%
...

Literacy demands in society have increased nowadays – however, they will never be
‘satisfactory’ as once schools meet the current definition of literacy, there will be
developments that necessitate new skills to be added
...
Now, students fan take A levels in both Language and Literature
...

English must be assessed using standard criteria as students are being tested on what they
have learnt so it is fair to mark the work accordingly
...

The similarities among curriculum aims from USA, Australia and England are all very similar,
perhaps due to being the same language
...

In both New Zealand and Australia, the trend in English in the curriculum highlighted the
nature of the relationship between concepts of national identity and descendants of British

settlers, indigenous people and more recent immigrants
...
E
...
The
issue of social integration and the relationship between English and Maori language was
contested
...
It agrees that attention must
be given to the New Zealand varieties of English and literature, as well as the rich,
international resources of English
...
It is distinguished by the beliefs
that underpin the choice of texts and approaches used to teach them
...
It is concerned with the language of texts
rather than the analysis of sentences
...
They reinstate grammar as an important aspect of
reproduction and use it as part of a writing process
...

In the 1921 Newbolt Report, English literature was held to be central to education as it
embodied the best thought of the best minds
...

In an influential series of essays, Leavis expressed that only a small, cultured minority were
equipped to fully understand literature and that it was their role to uphold the moral and
cultural values embodied in the very best of it
...

This Leavisite approach, however, was criticised for favouring a particular Anglo-Saxon class
and gender so the ‘universal meanings’ are only universal for them
...

Leavisites did also believe in power morally for the less academically gifted
...
Despite this approach being quite
utilitarian, it made way for the development of English through other subjects
...
This
report also identified the development of the social competence of the pupil as its main
aim
...

John Dixon’s ‘Growth Through English’ in 1967 became a key model which argued that by
ordering and composing situations that symbolise life as we know it, we bring order and
composure to our inner selves
...
Now, the report aimed to
respect every child’s heritage and not consider school and home as two separate cultures
...
This model also valued the use of television and film to teach, as well as the
spoken word
...
In 1986,
when GCSE’s were introduced, students began to be assessed across a range of speech
genres
...
However,
it did not have a comprehensive and serviceable model that teachers could usefully apply in
the classroom
...
He felt that we needed to readdress the imbalance that privileges
written language
...

However, Ofsted have still noted that classrooms are too teacher centred and even in group
discussions, children aren’t free enough to talk
...
It believes that no text is ideologically neutral
and that readers and writers are influenced by factors such as their beliefs, gender, power
relations etc
...

All texts are seen as influencing the reader
...
The
model implies direct participation from students and intervention in society through
researching, letter writing etc
...


However, being able to reproduce a powerful text type does not mean that the writer is
powerful or his text will carry any weight
...

Throughout the late 1970’s and 1980’s, The Centre for Policy Studies issued a number of
pamphlets on education which took a bleak view of prevailing standards in schools
...
English is not just a subject
2
...
It is as important to teach the written language as spoken language
4
...
Grammar is descriptive not prescriptive
6
...
Language use should be judged by its appropriateness
In 1995, Gunther Kresse was invited to state what he feels English is and what it will be:
1
...
English is a carrier of definitions of its society
3
...
English is the only subject in the curriculum where all modes and media can be debated,
analysed and taught
5
...

Future change in the English subject is being brought about by the multilingual nature of the
UK, English as the global lingua franca and developments in global technology
...

Since its colonial years, South Africa has been under constant influence by English
...

Now, 75% of grades come from continual assessment and 25% from exams
...
The expectation for school children to have increasing levels of
academic literacy is diminishing
...
The position of English has never been stronger: although access has
become even more elusive for those outside the socio-economic elite
...
They were often
idiosyncratic
...

Descriptive grammars aim to offer a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the structure
of a language, based on samples of actual usage
...

Underlying both is the theoretical grammars that aim to describe the general phenomenon
of human language rather than the structures of a particular language
...


English for Speakers of Other Languages
Nowadays, the global spread of English means that few people come to English classes
without some experience of English
...

Finally, many may feel resistance as the choice to learn English is imposed upon them
...
g
...
Globally, there has been a general
move towards more English classes for younger learners (5-11 years)
...
’
A second trend is the shift away from language alone and towards combining it with
curriculum content
...
Czech Republic and Brunei have also developed this bilingual education
...
In France most pupils study
3-4 hours of English a week from aged 11
...

In Malaysia, English was used for many years as the medium of education
...
This led to science students at university not having the
competence they needed in English to read texts
...

In Morocco, French is still the predominant foreign language but a reading knowledge of
English has become increasingly important at university level
...
In 1993, 90% of secondary school students listed English as
their preferred foreign language
...

In addition to English at school, there is huge demand for adult learners too
...
Students can choose whether to learn British or US English
...

Many issues have been raised on the variety of English that should be taught – Standard or
Local
...
Politics is also a factor – in south-East Asia, both
Australian and UK English is used
...


One solution could be for learners to understand the range of varieties; to speak one variety
locally and take up a standard one later on
...
Private language schools
are prime customers for these types of textbook
...

The grammar translation method of learning English is typical – it consists of some study
sentences in English that have a literal translation into the target language followed by the
actual translation
...

In contrast, oral pattern drilling became popular at the turn of the 20th century to teach
spoken English first
...
There was an
emphasis on pronunciation and grammatical form rather than on meanings
...
This drill exercise is authoritarian and
makes understanding the language less important than producing it on demand
...
This embraced not
only grammar, pronunciation and word meaning, but also knowledge of how to use
language appropriately for different audiences, how to construct well-written texts and how
to integrate language with other appropriate communication systems
...
’
Proponents of communicative teaching suggested that errors in early use of English were to
be expected and welcomed as signs of the learner hypothesing about how the language
system works
...

A demand for more interactive classrooms became apparent
...
He
argued that learners should be encouraged to participate in easily comprehensible activities,
absorbing English just as a child learns a first language and not produce it until ready to do
so
...

During periods of large-scale migration to English speaking countries, new teachers were
thought to be required as well as separate classes due to such different teaching methods
...

EFL textbooks have changed dramatically too to suit these needs – in the 1970’s, books
consisted of text, questions and substitution drills, whereas now there are video materials,
role-play, songs and games
...
For example, ‘Are those your books on the floor?’ could be a question, an order
or a complaint
...
They have no choice but to play along even if
they consequently develop unfavourable attitudes towards the language
...
For example, in ‘High Season’, a specialised textbook for the tourist industry, the
learner is taught to listen carefully, answer questions with factual information, describe
rooms and understand duties
...

Looking at ‘Business opportunities,’ the leaner is instead encouraged to make and justify
their own choices of action among a range of alternatives
...
There is a great deal of
emphasis on following instructions
...
Different positions are constructed for
the learner based on their perceived age or social status
...
Others may welcome new positions – gender
empowering for example
...
They were repositioned as ‘Third World Working Class,’ and not given
opportunities to receive English teaching to re-establish their identity as professionals
...

This has led many ESL teachers to transfer their focus from the learners themselves to the
wider context within which they must operate
...
Recently, Partnership

Teaching Progress has focused on changing school structures to make them more receptive
to a diversity of needs
...

When teaching English, many cross-cultural issues come up as typically it encourages
learners to adopt new values and attitudes considered appropriate for immigrants
...
Grant tries to ensure
that resource materials reflect national, social and cultural aspirations of a country
...
No attempt is made to ‘preach’ to the student:
rather, they are encouraged to use English to think about the issue
...

Grant also worked in china, helping to develop a new English curriculum programme
...

Particular emphasis was given to ‘cultural differences’, although texts were checked to
ensure they were not politically controversial
...
Racism was also highlighted
...

In Tanzania, there is a problem with free press
...
A story on a failed village settlement scheme was seen as both
wrong to report as it may sway people against the government’s views: a moral obligation
to write or something to be written with great care
...
There were actually positive results and the president had no
problems with it
...
g
...

It is interesting that in ex-colonial countries such as Africa, less emphasis is on teaching
English culture and more is put on local issues
...


In 1935, the British Council was set up to promote Britain and the English language abroad
...
To avoid being unpopular, he felt Britain should present English as an international
language
...

This promotion has given way to local English teaching expertise in non-English dominant
countries, meaning they no longer need ‘experts’ as teachers
...
Its aims wee to ensure that English remained the
preferred language for international communication and sustain and develop the global
market for English goods and services
...
He feels that people are being persuaded of the superior merits
of English (modernisation, liberalism etc) compared to backwards, parochial languages;
being promised goods and services to those who use English (education, progress etc); and
being forced to support issues that stigmatise local languages (internal divisions, resource
costs etc)
...
But their aim was multilingualism
...

Annamalai stated that English helped maintain divisions and hierarchs within a country as it
is used for elite formation and international identity
...

Rogers feels that teaching English in the context of developing economies does not work for
the majority
...
If the aim is really to
access educational opportunity, progress is more likely in their local language
...
‘The English Only’ debate continues throughout the world where it has
already effected the provision of bilingual education in USA as well as Hong Kong
...
However,
more emphasis has been put on literacy in the mother tongue first now
...
Diversification of the ELT curriculum – Many want to combine ELT with cultural studies;
‘international’ ESP for doctors, tour guides etc; EAP for university students; balancing
literacy and communication skills
...
Broader educational remit for English teaching – Teaching ESOL in wider educational
programmes such as science, history etc
...

However, one must question whether students are given access to powerful ways of writing
or simply coached to produce set forms to pass exams
...
Critical approaches to languages in society – This approach is used in South Africa – what
being a speaker of English means to students in the ‘new’ South Africa and how the
language has different social meanings is considered? Others take the English that the
natives have seen around them which helps improve competence as well as increases
awareness of what happens when two cultures come into contact
...
Bilingual approaches to language learning - Focus on both forms of language as well as
communicative activities are considered which offers considerable potential for learners
...

Many people want to learn the English that they hear in the streets as this is the real thing
and has been described as ‘secret English’ by Australian Aboriginals
...
This spread of academic
English has lead to a diminishing of other academic languages: before World War II
mathematics research was principally in German
...

Academic life can be defined as individual discourse communities that establish their own
language conventions and practices which new members have to acquire
...
e
...
These communities can
overlap – e
...
sociologists and historians share many similar conventions
...
Many terms
can be guessed
...
Academic discourses tend to omit the first
person and prefer to use the collective ‘we’ along with third person structures
...

Researchers often group disciplines together according to how they are perceived:
Hard – disciplines’ that build knowledge around a framework of shared assumptions (e
...

pure sciences)
Soft – subjective research that encourages knowledge as a matter of interpretation (e
...

Humanities)
Applied – practically orientated subjects (e
...
engineering)
Pure – require more logic and thinking (e
...
mathematics)
These genres arise from within the contexts of the disciplines concerned and from what the
disciplinary practitioners deem important
...

Writing for a particular discipline involves learning the technical language associated with
that discipline
...


Research Articles are the most common genre as they are key to promotion prospects
within academia
...
Each discipline has specific linguistic
characteristics – i
...
scientific papers use more complex noun phrases in subject position
...

Research shows that hard science texts contain almost twice as many directives for 10,000
words equating to 65% compared to other discourse communities
...
Scientists can rhetorically play down their role to strengthen the objectivity of
their interpretations and replicability of procedures whilst highlighting the phenomena
under study
...

These directives help writers maintain the fiction of objectivity by avoiding explicit
attitudinal signals while simultaneously allowing them to adopt an authoritative command
of their data
...

In soft fields, directives depend more on an ability to invoke a credible and engaging
persona
...

Philosophy tended to use more personal persuasive devices such as ‘we’ and boosters
...

Directives, in this case, reduce the distance between participants and stress the shared
journey of exploration
...
Directives allow them to ‘cut to the heart’
of an argument without more space consuming locutions
...

In hard disciplines, there is a strong need for precision particularly in the application of
specific methodologies
...

Overall, social relationships within discourse communities exercise strong constraints on a
writer’s representation of self and others
...


Swales researched informal elements of academic writing to see what the most common
features were
...

Philosophers wrote the most informally and statisticians the most formal
...
Statisticians follow the factual belief and thus
maintain a faceless style that conforms to the traditions of their genre
...

There are particular literacy practices associated with the different linguistic and cultural
communities to which writers belong
...

Sometimes, writers with English as a second language may transfer inappropriate features
due to the linguistic resources available in their language – e
...
fewer conjunctions are used
in Arabic or the topic is not restated in Chinese
...

The model academic essay in English is said to be characterised by a deductive style of
argument which presents its main thesis before arguing its case
...
Many speakers from
non- English backgrounds use an ‘inductive’ method that assumes a hierarchical relationship
between writer and reader and thus the student does not wish to criticise the teacher etc
...

The interpersonal function in written texts is seen through personal pronouns and
expressions of emotion
...
Similarly, writers
must ‘second-guess’ the kind of information that readers will expect to find
...

Research conducted has shown that Chinese students use the first person singular four
times more than the average for professional academic prose
...
These students appeared to be
transferring features from their first language as well as being influenced by journalistic
writing
...


Academic writing contains many subtle indications of authorial stance
...
The use of reporting verbs such as ‘claimed’ helped do this in English
...

Cross-cultural differences showed that non-factive verbs presented knowledge not as fixed
or absolute but something which is evaluated through institutionalised processes of
research was common of the OU; whereas, in India, factive verbs were preferred, usually in
the past tense to reinforce factivity
...
g
...
This
leads to outside texts being defined as ‘out of focus’ as there are strict rules to conform to
...

Literacy has different importance in each community as well as varied notions on truth and
fact – each society has its own concept of what functions as true and the mechanisms by
which it is sanctioned
...

Academic writing indicates that cultural considerations play a role in the development of
linguistic structures and discourse patterns
...
These structures show that the writer is highly linguistically competent, yet he violates
all expectations of inner circle readers
...
The Hindi ‘deliberative’ text has a
subtle difference to the English ‘argumentative’ text
...
This contrast sharply with the
expectation in US English that the writer’s responsibility is effective communication
...
For
example, an Indian will link meaning to classical Sanskrit or Perso-Arabic tradition
...
This is related to the idea of politeness in their
community – indirectness allows readers to draw their own conclusions rather than be
imposed upon
...
Many writing in
a second language try to preserve their cultural ‘identity’ by the retention of certain
pragmatic features
...

In academic writing, students are creating an identity for themselves
...
Many students must
learn to write like academics before knowing what is involved
...
One way this is done is by adopting a
disciplinary position
...
g
...
All adjective chooses carry
the writer’s value judgements on the uses discussed, conveying a strong indication of
stance
...
If an active verb such as ‘are disappearing’ was used,
the effect would be different
...

Research shows that many students struggle to find out what tutors expect them to follow
as well as some students feeling the identity they are expected to adopt differs
fundamentally from their own sense of ‘real’ self
...
’ Other
students don’t know whether to explore other voices or not as they usually have to conform
to a set list of established conventions on content and style
...
Students experience
difficulties when writing essays as they are afraid of plagiarism
...
They receive mixed messages of putting something in their own
words but using a fixed canon of knowledge and terminology to go with it
...

Recently, hedging has been identified as a specific feature of academic writing
...
Framing, qualifying the statement as an opinion
1
...
I guess

B
...
I suppose I would
2
...
Softening a descriptor
1
...

2
...


What Makes English into an Art?
Stylisticians believe that literary language is different from everyday language because it
draws attention to some property of the language itself and highlights or foregrounds it
...

One example would be how poetry regularly uses controlled patterns of rhythm, rhyme and
repetition
...
This gives the poem a beat which
enhances the poem’s sensory appeal by imitating the animal’s foot hitting the ground
...

In each stanza, the first two and bottom two lines rhyme
...
These rhymes increase emphasis and
develop expectation in the reader
...

Rhythm, rhyme and repetition contribute to the poem’s imagery – fire, blacksmith and
darkness
...
This belief
underpins the dominant 20th century approach known as ‘practical criticism
...

Rhyme is a type of ‘phonetic echo’ – in English verse the end rhyme is most important
...

Rhymes within a line are known as ‘internal rhymes
...

Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons used alliteration for poetic cohesion
...

Every language has rules for combining words and sounds
...
Secondly, words have
paradigmatic relationships with other words which could grammatically and semantically
replace them (Did he smile his work to see? – work has a paradigmatic relationship with
creation/product)
...

In Faulkner’s novel @The Sound and The Fury,’ to represent what is going on in a character’s
mind, he requires the reader to be ‘shocked’ out of feeling comfortable with the language
...


E e cummings refuses to use upper-case letters and constantly plays around with
morphology
...
Here
...

In the opening to Dickens’ ‘Bleak House,’ he omits the man verb from each clause drawing
the reader into the actual context of the novel
...

In Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children,’ the reader is addressed as an intimate friend
...
The chaos is added to
by the lack of commas in the list in the last sentence
...
In Duffy’s poem
‘Litany’, She states, ‘The terrible marriages crackled, cellophane round polyester shirts
...

Here, Duffy relies on the reader’s collocations of ‘crackle’ to makes sense of her unusual
choice of verb
...

These collocations can be captured in a large computerised text
...
Sinclair found that verbs like ‘set in’ almost always
have negative connotations – decay, bitterness, rigor mortis etc
...
In Larkin’s poem ‘Days are’
...
This shows that our unconscious understanding of word associations is built up
through previous experiences with them
...
In Fuguard’s play ‘My Child! My Africa!’ we see
how ‘riot’ is represented by two different children – for the black boy, it represents the
threat of violence, whereas for the white girl, it means fun
...
This relationship can be symbolic but it can also be
indexical -0 e
...
smoke is a sign of fire
...
In ‘The Tyger’, ‘What dread hand and what dread
feet’ is iconic – imitating the beating of an anvil – and symbolic – hands and feet are related
...
g
...
Iconicity
can also be achieved through the manipulation of grammatical rules – Wordsworth evokes
the childhood pleasure of getting dizzy by having a long sentence where the subject and

verb occur at the end
...
The sentence structure suggests this takes
longer than expected and even when he recovers, the earth is still spinning
...
The fabula is like a skeleton, given
life by the way the sjuzhet is used to explore intricacies of the plot
...
The stream’s
turbulence reflects the psychology of the situation
...

Authors must also make decisions on how to represent natural speech in their characters’
dialogue
...
In Pinter’s play ‘Night School’, he parodies the
tendency of people to repeat each other’s words but stylise these repetitions for rhythmic
effect
...

In prose, stretches of dialogue are usually framed with particular reasons for choosing or
ending a dialogue
...

Sometimes, the author’s voice is heard in the character for ironic effect or the character’s
voice is heard in the narrative
...

Recently, there has been a growth in the number of writers using English vernacular in their
novels
...
Tony Harrison, a British poet, also addresses
linguistic equality in his Yorkshire dialect poems
...

There is always a reason why the author opts for the vernacular choice of language
...
In ‘The Colour Purple,’ the character is writing to God with non-standard
grammar, reflecting her black working-class background
...

Vernacular can also convey messages about the kind of person the character is
...


In the Just William novels, Compton uses vernacular speech to convey William as a
nonconformist rascal
...
g
...
Wot acts as a symbol of nonstandardness and usually represents less intelligent, socially low characters
...

In Hoban’s ‘Riddley Walker,’ English in a post-holocaust future has transformed and a new
vernacular has been created
...
The language reflects the disintegrating of society and represents it in words
...

Sometimes, the boundary between representation of authentic dialects and invented
vernaculars is blurred
...
The author’s choice represents their own
attitudes and values towards varieties of English and the values of their society
...
In a study of the 3 main characters in Austen’s ‘Northanger
Abbey’ the 2 ladies use ‘I’ far more frequently than the man, whereas his use of ‘the’ and
‘of’ is more
...

Recently, there has been a surge in how the context and process involved in creating
language art and the contexts in which it is read or viewed affect meaning and
interpretation
...
Literary texts are, therefore, ideological – they present
the reader with the author’s view of a matter through the language of the text
...
The opening line of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is an example of this
...
The basis of this view is that all
texts are affected in some way by previous texts
...
This
may lead one to think of the apartheid, modern democracy or indeed, the slave trade
...


In Jean Breeze’s ‘Spring Cleaning,’ she juxtaposes cleaning with the 23rd psalm to underline
the gulf between words of comfort and the hard drudgery of her life
...
The context in which a text is
received is very important
...

In many cultures, oral story telling is still highly valued
...
Even today dub poetry exists which
ridicules politics to instrumental music
...
Writers may come to
express proprietarily interests in the language they write, but they have usually approached
it with some anxiety about their own rights to it
...
This can be much harder for those living in a colonial or postcolonial society
...
He
used to listen to oral tales of animals through this language as a child
...

Then, he was sent to a colonial school and suddenly the language of his education was no
longer the language of his culture
...
No matter what subjects you passed, if you
didn’t pass English, you could not succeed in education
...
Many academics questioned why
he had abandoned them
...

He sees his writing as a direct response to anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan people
...
’
Any consideration about what language to write in will involve complex questions of power
and culture, the language’s status and traditions
...
Wa Thiong’o sees the use of English as a sign of colonial elitedom, a
continuing theft of African culture, as of its other ‘natural’ resources
...
An example is Godfrey Munira, a teacher whose training has
made him unable to meet the real needs of the pupils who are much cleverer than him
...
He gained inspiration from Nigerian writer, Chunua Achebe
...
He stated that
although the British failed to give Africans a song, they at least gave them a tongue for
sighing
...

Both Ngugi and Achebe see English as loaded with a past that damaged and challenged
African writers
...

Using English would imply betrayal of their people and values as well as being classed as
writing un-English English
...


Ngugi is happy to write in Gikuyo for select fans and leave his work to be translated
...
Ngugi believes English was the means
for spiritual subjugation whereas Achebe is keen to state that he doesn’t want his readers to
think it was ‘one long night of savagery
...
Children lean straight away that they are children and thus, are less
knowledgeable about the world
...

The language of schooling will always carry the ambiguities inherent in the reasons there are
for learning them
...
The character’s ‘good’ English can never be an unambiguous good in a
society where she is black, single and living on the breadline
...
In Achebes, ‘Arrow of God,’ he uses formal Standard English with
Igbo idioms to represent the Igbo language
...
Achebe achieves that the policemen have lost their senses in direct
proportion to their reliance on English to intimidate their non-English speaking compatriots
...
This successfully identifies particular social
relations
...
His English shows the range of languages and
dialects used in urban Indian settings
...
English dialect as they
would be spoken and Standard English for characters which is always noted by the narrator
...
By doing this Naipaul can produce new, hybrid
forms of language
...
He makes it clear that he is deliberately trying to be imaginative
and not create Anglo Saxon English
...
Naipaul has a problem with voice and
point of views – he attempts to mix his own view of Trinidad with its relation in the activity
of writing
...
Naipaul feels ‘rootless’ – he has a need to recognise
where Indians have moved to and how they have made3 a new life for themselves
...


The new English literatures focus on the status of writing in societies with an oral rather
than a literature culture
...
Maxine Hong Kingston sees gender as indivisibly implicated
in racial and linguistic identity
...

Hong Kingston’s [protagonist in ‘The Woman Warrior’, talks of her silence in American
school and her noisiness in Chinese school
...

Seamus Heaney writes about Walcott, a West Indian writer
...
He compares Walcott to
J
...
Synge which reinforces the idea that Walcott made a theme of choice and the
impossibility of choosing
...
He sees
the poetry with a language deriving from a history of struggle
...
An understanding of language’s
geography, its relation to landscape and the lives lived within these physical worlds is
essential to a culture in which the metropolitan centre depend on and are revived by the
traffic with the rest of the world that language makes possible
...
News began with the telegraph in the mid 19th century – here was
where news acquired its modern pattern: a quest to get the story first and the use of a nonchronological format for writing stories
...

The patterns of news work operate to the rhythm of daily deadlines
...
Time is a defining characteristic of news
English – it is a major compulsion in news gathering and has an influence on the structure of
news discourse
...
Within Brewer made a distinction between event structure and
discourse structure – between the order events occur and the order which they are told in a
story
...

William Labov separated the structure of personal narratives into 6 elements:
1
...

3
...

5
...


Abstract – summaries contrast action and main point of narrative
...

The structure of news tends to differ from this structure
...
It summarises the central action and point of the story
...
Abstracts are often linked by time expressions which often imply a cause and
effect link
...
Time is almost never expressed
in headlines
...

ORIENTATION – For journalists, the basic facts are who, what, when and where: they are
given in a concentrated form at the beginning of the story but may be expanded further
down
...


Time zero refers to an event with no time specification
...
Others place events in relation to each
other and others are deictic
...
Often, deictics have a different meaning to both writer and
reader
...
Narrative
recapitulates past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of
events which actually occurred
...

If narrative clauses are reversed, the inferred temporal sequence of the original semantic
interpretation is altered
...
It contains a single temporal juncture
...
Free clauses can also be inserted which can be moved anywhere as they
are outside of temporal juncture
...

New stories, by contrast, are seldom told in chronological order
...
It presents the chain of events in reverse order
...
There is always a good deal of looking forward to the future too
...

EVALUATION, RESOLUTION + CODA – Evaluation is the means by which the significance of a
story is established
...
The point is often the self-aggrandisement of the narrator
...
They establish the
news’ significance, focus the events and justify claiming the audience’s attention
...
The
lead sentence is a nucleus of news evaluation that forms the lens through which the
remainder of the story is viewed
...
When they do, the result will be at the lead, not at the end
...
The beginning is everything and the end is nothing
...
In narration, the coda returns the floor to other
conversational partners and returns the tense from narrative time to present time
...


In news English, order is everything but chronology is nothing
...
This news format emerged in American journalism in
the late 19th century
...
The
radical discontinuity of time between many sentences imparts a general lack of cohesion
which is typified by each news sentence usually being its own paragraph
...
The news story jumps from
one statement to the next, offering isolated chunks of information
...

Attribution – where the story came from
...

Episodes and events – the body of the story
...
The actors involved and action that takes place are described
as well as the setting
...
These present the past, the present and the future of the events described in
the main action of the story
...
Commentary provides the
journalist’s observations on the action in the present time period and follow-up covers the
story’s future time – any action subsequent to the main action of an event
...

Van Dijk’s analysis of newspaper stories in other languages also found few significant
differences in news values or structure
...

The values of the media control the ways in which news is presented
...
Recency of immediacy means that the best news is something
that has only just happened
...
Unexpectedness means that the unpredictable is better than
the routine
...
Election stories are easy to report as readers
know the election date and thus, when they will end
...
This style is known as the ‘horse race
...

The press best handles stories that are timely, that have anticipatable end points and that
have end points that figure in simple, binary possibilities
...
Continuity means when something is in the news, it tends to stay there
...
The rush of a deadline is largely selfinflicted – it is the news workers themselves who put the pressure on to reach a deadline
...
An event is more likely to be
covered if it can be prescheduled for journalists
...
e
...
Journalist can process
these quickly into a new story
...
It is a matter of journalistic pride but one that has little to do
with quality or public service
...
The American focus on the scoop serves to cover up the bureaucratic and prosaic
reality of most news gatherings
...
Public officials are able to ‘prey on’ people with stopwatch
mentalities
...
Deadlines encourage high productivity and help compensate for
the humdrum nature of most news work
...
News making has been coined
heteroglossia – the mixing of many voices
...
Authorship is seldom
shared but describing the author of the story is an extreme idealisation
...
Journalist depends on both written and
spoken documents for their stories
...

The processing of news involves the complex and rapid movement of copy between
individuals within a newsroom
...

However, an average news item has probably been through at least four separate
newsrooms
...
The social history of a word remains present even when the
word is used in a very different context
...


Intertextuality is a main means by which journalist meet the productivity demands of their
employer
...
Even in everyday speech, speakers constantly quote others
...
This process is essentially liner
and can be seen as segmented horizontally
...
Each successive handling produces a potentially different text
...

Documents play a large part too in news stories
...
Journalist prefers prefabricated texts as it requires minimum
reworking – these include news agency copy, press releases and earlier stories on the same
topic
...
Texts already cast in a news style have a much better chance of being
selected, even if another story is much more newsworthy
...
Faced with a wide range of sources, journalist must select
and reject specific written material, reproduce the source material, summarise in early
paragraphs to be detailed later, generalise and particularise and frequently restyle and
translate information from scientific phraseology to normal wording
...
In
the 1830’s the ‘penny press; was introduced – it was a consumer good for a consumer
society that reflected all of society and politics
...
Secondly, the penny press replaced partisanship and an explicit ideological
context in which to present and explain the news
...
Thirdly, it imposed the cycle of habit and commerce
upon the life of society generally – the latest news can make a difference between success
and failure
...

The telegraph cemented everything the penny press set in motion
...
It turned competition away from price and quality and
onto timeliness
...
It
also stripped language of the regional and colloquial
...
The telegraph also
eliminated the correspondent who provided letters that replaced an event and analysed it
in detail
...

This led to a new journalism still used today – a journalism that made description and
explanation radically problematic
...
It filled the paper with human interest material and
divorced the announcement of news from its analysis
...
Deregulation of frequencies and ownership is opening the TV spectrum to
private operators in countries where public TV has been the norm
...
Now, we are moving away from this kind of segmented
programming to a commercially orientated flow of programmes design to lock in the views
to a particular station
...
Attention is also now focused on the
technology of the satellite
...
g
...
The move to live coverage of news also takes reporting from the past tense to the
present
...
It makes news published in other
ways more accessible, it provides access to the raw materials of reporting and websites
themselves offer specific real time news
...

There are many forms of visual information that members of a culture decode
automatically, so effective is the process of internalisation
...

These signs diminish the amount of decoding time needed and very quickly take on a
‘natural’ appearance
...

Many visual signs cannot be classed as English but rather conventionalised international
symbols
...
For some, its
context dictates its meaning: - go up or go straight on
...

New symbols are often designed in the simplest way possible to be understood
...
For
example, in Britain, a robin is a typical instance of a bird – a simplified drawing of one may
come to signify all birds
...
Morgan and Welton note
that our ideas of perspective and reality are conditioned by the culture and time in which
we are living
...
Are letterforms
and shapes of words visual or verbal? This is a graphosemantic matter – meaning deriving
from the text’s ‘writtenness
...

Derwing found that people may perceive phonetic differences or attach different meanings
to different spellings of the same word
...
Bollinger’s test on his students revealed ‘grey’ as a positive
connotation and ‘gray’ as a negative
...
In newspapers, the headlines’ typeface often reflects the articles content or writer’s
opinion – wobbly letters for a ghost, jagged for a storm etc
...
Clues to other languages can also be
made – the backwards ‘r’ to connotate ‘Russianness’ in vodka
...
A poem by Cal Swann plays on typeface to convey the

relationship between headmaster and pupil – bold face and small, faint letters reflecting the
power differential
...
Similarly, using ‘caps lock’ on the
computer can be seen as shouting
...

Packaging serves several functions such as protecting merchandise, encouraging sales and
informing of content
...
Packaging’s sophistication reflects complexity in communicative function
...
Being
multimodal, different messages may be conveyed through each mode and thus, risk
contradictions and tensions
...

The label must also appeal to the purchaser, the host and guest – a supermarket brand
name may suggest reliable quality, yet would be deemed unsuitable for a special occasion
...
These
conflicting voices regulate the social relation that can be established with a reader
...

Legal restrictions ensure certain information is included on wine bottles
...
Similarly, using English on wine labels will not enhance
the product’s perceived value as the UK is not associated with wine
...
Typically, all key
information is written on the front of the label
...
’ Visual designs helps limit textual contradictions by establishing an
order of priority and separating off ‘housekeeping’ rules with a ruled line
...

Burt proved that context and form are inextricably linked – many people are sensitive to the
‘atmosphere’ set up by a text
...

Advertisements of ‘own it now’ rely upon the anagrams and visual similarity of the two
words
...
Satirical cartoons in newspapers on children’s
drawings
...

Some visual puns will only work in English – headlines are used to reinforce an ‘us and them’
dichotomy: ‘Tomb it may concern’ – Council write to 9 dead men at graveyard
...
Any semiotic mode develops resources for fulfilling three kinds of metafunctions:
ideational, textual and inter personal
...
e
...

Regarding, direct address, it can be shown both verbally (Hey you!), or visually (Your country
Needs You poster)
...
Many texts use both modes of language
today to show their point
...

Here, given and new are realised sequentially
...
Advertising often shows these two extremes – a headache advert shows a
grenade at the top followed by a smiling face to show the before and after of taking pills
...
English requires two representational elements: processes and
participants
...
ACTIONS – Only one participant – ‘in void’ – The soldier (actor) fired (action)
2
...
EVENT – only one participant – ‘just happening’ - Innocent villagers (goal) died (event)
These choices are highly motivated by context and the writer’s representation
...
This
could be objects, angles or elements and clearly portray who is doing what to whom
...
Vectors also help construct visual narratives
...

Modality is another important aspect of verbal English – seen in Halliday’s model as
‘expressions of comment or attitude by a speaker towards a proposition indicating
obligation, permission, desirability and truth
...

Modality can also be expressed visually with some images presented as more real than
others:
- a simple line drawing shows how modality whereas a sharply detailed photo shows high
modality
...

Creating diagrams involve decisions such as what to include and how to present it
...
Associated with promotion and popularisation but a distraction from scientific data,
scientists released coloured photos of space to the press but worked with black and white
ones
...
These include paralinguistic features of facial expression,
gesture and posture as well as proxemic indicators of closeness, distance etc
...
Punctuation is also frequently
used – exclamation marks for surprise or a wide range of symbols for swearing or moments
when English cannot express the feelings felt
...
Letters can be
repeated to show stammering and clues to a character’s accent are given through semiphonetic representation of speech
...
Frames are not the only way to create a visual narrative – change
of background and subject matter are also used to create a coherent story
...
Here, the vectors also create links between reader and character –

neither knows where they are heading yet, nor what the outcome will be
...

Deictic can also operate in visual English
...
Colour can also be used deictically to indicate time or the passage of time
...

PRESENT
TENSE

PAST TIME
INDICATOR

THOUGHT

EMOTION

Relationships can be represented in images through camera angle
...
The size of the frame also indicates social distance – close-ups, long
shots etc depict friends or strangers
...
Placing the reader on the same level as the character creates empathy and
solidarity
...

Culture and the influence of verbal language also play an important role in page layout
...
But American cartoons use
more action-to-action frame transitions compared to Japan’s subject-to-subject transitions
...
’
Creating meaning from a multimodal text depends on the interaction of verbal and visual
English presented to the eye, as well as contextual and background knowledge
...
The Sun reported a story entitled ‘Blackmail’ with the
image of a black male next to it – negative connotations form in a reader’s mind because of
their positioning on the page
...
A problem
arises on how to transcribe music and pictures on the page though and how to analyse their
interaction with each other and language
...

When putting together the pictures and lyrics, a complex set of metaphors and puns are
found:
1
...

2
...


3
...

5
...


There’s a cool, fresh world – fantasy world of toboggan run
...

A twist of lemon – twist in tale and also in toboggan run
...

The change in the music’s mood allows the ad to make two suggestions: the product is a
solution to a problem and the product will bring people together
...

English Manuscripts: the emergence of a visual identity
...

The oldest known piece of writing in English is a carving on a roe deer’s ankle bone found in
Norfolk and dating from AD400
...
’ The letters are based on lines that can be cut easily with a blade
...

Rune translation into Old English:
Romwolusndreumwolustwnegen
Romulus and Remus, two brothers
Runic inscriptions contain a range of letters in the futhorc - between 24 and 31 – several
have no equivalent in Modern English or in the Graeco-Latin alphabet
...
The shape reflects the technology used to create them
...
e
...
Runes also provide evidence to pronunciation –
Scandinavia only had 16 letters compared to 31 in English, showing how pronunciation
matured
...

The ogham script was also used for Celtic inscriptions in Ireland and Wales at this time
...
However, unlike the
futhorc, its characters were unrelated to Latin or Greek
...
Even
in Old English runic inscriptions, Latin appears alongside
...
The runes remained in usage as a magical device or secret writing
...
This writing was remarkably
standard throughout the Roman Empire
...
The few texts we do have
represent the only evidence of earlier stages of English
...

These early texts have also influenced the appearance of present day English texts – many
of its conventions were first worked out in connection with these manuscripts
...
Administrative documents were
not written in English until the 14th century
...

Book production in medieval times was located almost entirely at monasteries as there was
a scarcity of skills to produce them and the process was very expensive
...

Books were copied in a scriptorium
...
The process involved many people – several copyists,
an assistant, a rubricator (who added the headings) and an illuminator (who created
elaborate paintings)
...
Thus, each copy was slightly different
...
Monkwearmouth and Jarrow were also important copying centres
...
These gospels reflect how language had become an art – letters are entwined
with animal figures and multicoloured tracery
...

The lack of gaps between words was also common in Latin texts – it possessed an easily
recognisable word pattern so spaces became less important
...


The Lindisfarne Gospels also include ‘insular majuscule’ – a book hand first developed by the
Christian scribes in Ireland
...
Vacial was also known as the ‘two-line script’ as all letters are shown with the
same height
...
’
Another hand used in ancient Northumbria was known as ‘insular minuscule’ – a more
cursive and less formal development of insular majuscule
...
Uncial was still used for headings and important sections showing
how each script developed a conventional meaning
...

Insular minuscule became adopted for Old English – the Lindisfarne Gospels had Old English
added between the lines of the original in the 10th century
...

Insular minuscule had to be adapted before used for Old English – extra letters were added
to accommodate particular sounds like P (th) and P (w), (th in the), (ash) J, v and w was
not used in the Old English alphabet
...
In ‘Marvels of the East’ from 1040AD, Latin is written in Carolingian
script accompanied by Old English in insular minuscule
...
It was also politically motivated – an attempt to reintroduce a common
book hand throughout Europe
...

Insular majuscule
Old English
Uncial
Insular minuscule
Carolingian

In no other part of Europe did a tradition of vernacular literature emerge so early as in
England
...

In the 9th century when Vikings attacked Northern monasteries, book production shifted to
the South
...
The most famous Old English
text is Beowulf, an epic poem concerning the origins of Germanic settlers in England
...
The Norman
Conquest was one of the reasons for such a change in the language
...
Manuscripts began to
focus less on illustration and more on text
...

In the 12th century, the Carolingian script became straightened and squared
...
It also reflected the use of a reed rather than quill pen and architectural trends for
tall, perpendicular forms
...

Scriveners began making their own guilds and secular books expanded in number
...

More authors began writing in the vernacular with cookery books, literature and medical
manuals written up
...
Increasingly, individuals needed to
learn writing to create documents for personal use
...
The rest shows continuity
with earlier traditions – two columns, rubric captions and the decoration of the first letter
...
There is still
no punctuation
...
Raised, mid and low points existed which marked
anything from word breaks to paragraphs
...

Until 1700, such punctuation was designed to help people reading aloud – suitable places
for pausing were indicated as well as inflection of voice
...


In the 14th century, English again became the language of record
...

By the 15th century, economic growth had led to the writing of many more business
documents
...
These were known collectively as ‘court hands’ and the style of writing as
‘bastard
...
The need for a book hand disappeared and after the 15th century,
handwriting was exclusively used for commercial, legal and personal purposes
...

The first was italic – popular from1550 onwards and often used in Latin and display scripts in
English, it was used especially by women as the ‘business’ scripts were considered of male
preserve
...
After 1700, this hand declined in favour of italic
...
A key book using the copperplate italic style was ‘The Universal Penman
...
This became the main hand of
British colonial administration
...
With copperplate, modulation of thickness arose from pen pressure
...
For the first time, writing became a matter for the ordinary
citizen
...
For example, teaching working-class boys a business hand would encourage them
to aspire to jobs they couldn’t get
...

Vere Foster became the man who found an individual style for schools
...


Foster’s style was not universally accepted – seen as a round hand for boys, girls objected
...

In the 1950’s italic was revived at school
...

Nowadays, there is a widespread belief that handwriting should betray the identity of an
individual more readily than that of the institution within which the writer was trained
...
It
is now totally part of the personal sphere – notes, diaries and letters
...

Spelling in Old English manuscripts was based largely on Latin with modifications required to
accommodate particular sound systems of English
...
The reason behind this is the small production
area of books where there was little dialect variation
...
The North of
the country developed Scandinavian influence and the South developed French influence:
e
...
such was written as swilk, swich and soch
...
g
...

The arrival of printing also helped consolidate and establish fixed patterns in English spelling
– for the first time, every reader had an identical copy of a work
...
Many people have sought to make English
orthography more phonetic
...
Due
to insufficient letters, they are not used in a simple way to represent particular sounds
...

Also in English spelling, one must look at the end of a word to work out its pronunciation
...
Thus, one
particular accent is being favoured over another leading to people with other accents being
in the same position as before or forced to adopt new speech
...
He calls for all silent letters to be omitted –
e
...
bread becomes bred and built becomes bilt and argues this would help foreigners and
children to learn the language
...
Finally, he calls for vowels to have a dot on top to distinguish
its length
...
Foreigners would also benefit from this ease in
learning
...
He believes such
reform would save page space and expenses as the number of letters would be reduced
...

Webster believed this change would lead to books being published in USA
...

In England, phonetic spelling reform acquired little institutional support until the 19th
century when Isaac Pitman developed a system of shorthand writing called photography
...
Due to this success, Pitman teamed
up with Alexander Ellis to refine dozens of alphabets that were phonetically well-rounded
for both writing and printing
...
Robert Bridges proposed adopting an aesthetically
pleasing script such as the insular majuscule for a model and ended up using an old AngloSaxon font
...

In the 1960’s, Pitman’s grandson James played a key role in implementing a new
orthography called the ‘initial teaching alphabet’ at schools
...

Glossic was another phonetic transcription system invented by Ellis in the late 19th century –
it was created to represent fine nuances of accent
...


English and New Media
Many see English as the dominant language of communication via the internet
...
Daniel Dor sees
‘Englishisation’ as a push for economic globalisation
...
Due to the speed and spread of
information, the demand for a lingua franca is necessary
...

However, there is now a drive to push multilingualism to the fore
...
E
...
BBC World uses 33 different languages
...

According to statistics, English dominated the internet in 2000 with 51
...
The total for populations with other languages has increased – notably
Chinese with 13% but the proportion of ‘other languages’ has risen too, indicating the
number of languages on the internet is growing
...
However, in terms of
internet growth, English lays behind Chinese considerably as well as Spanish and Japanese
...

Dor believes this multilingualism is not negotiated but rather ‘imposed’ or driven by
economic interests often outside the control of local language users
...
This means that each language group will bring their own influences into
their version of English
...
In general, monolingual messages were the most common with
9i7% messages when mixed languages occurred was typically to translate a section or
address a particular person
...
Perhaps due to the
need for all users to understand and the fact that it uses scientific terminology
...
If a word
isn’t known, it is simply left in their native tongue
...

Examples include ‘informations’ in plural and the overuse of the infinitive
...
One
change is the introduction of new words or word forms to refer to new media and new

media practices
...
g
...
Abbreviations and acronyms are
common too, such as thnx and TTFN
...

Word formation can be done in various ways:
1
...
Affixation – Prefixes such as hyper fiction/ Suffixes such as Chabot
3
...
Conversion – Word class change – caps lock becomes a verb
5
...
Punctuation – Infix the dot in net
...
g
...
These games use avatars and employ verbal
commands to navigate around their space
...
In L33t, 4 substitutes for A, 3 for E, I for 0,7 for T and 5 for S,
amongst many other rules
...

A person’s rhetoric must also change so an agreement may be expressed as U ROXXOR!
There is also specific vocabulary such as fragging for killing and lamer for a poor player
...

Crystal believes all aspects of English language study have been affected by technological
developments
...

Digitisation has led to physical artefacts being transferred onto the computer and put online
through digital repositories
...

In the UK, there is considerable access to the internet – roughly 33,521,621 people
...

Digitisation allows readers to select a particular version of a text, as indicated my dropdown boxes
...

Digitisation helps preservation by reducing the physical disturbance to texts
...
Access is also widened to a

previously restricted text making history of language and linguistic resources more generally
available
...
Many out of copyright books are uploaded to sites such as Project
Gutenberg
...

Eastgate Systems focuses exclusively on electronic, hypertext material based on its
authoring system ‘storyspace
...

Hyperlinks create new opportunity for artistic expression and new contexts for the language
of computer-based literary texts
...

Print-based novels follow a tradition of reading linearly, even if events are not written
chronologically
...
Hyper fiction, however, is
non-linear: it offers multiple pathways through the work that the reader must decide on
...
Ordering of sentences can affect a reader’s interpretation of a text – if I say
‘Tracy was late, she got in her car, she asked for directions, it applies she was already late
but if I swop the order, it suggests that stopping for directions made her late
...
This representation clearly displays the properties of
boundaries
...

Hyper fiction makes use of multimodality trough its node showing moving images which
would not be possible in a print- based book
...

Bernstein believes that hyper text structure combines the topology of links and the language
of individual nodes
...
This tangle confronts readers with variety of links without providing sufficient clues
to guide the reader’s choice
...
Although
these bots represents turn taking and adjacency pairs, at times communication breaks down
as the bot misinterprets a command or has been programmed wrongly
...
Really the output is an extension of the
intelligence of the designer
...
There is an ongoing debate as to whether this
multilingualism is imposed or reflects speaker’s interests
...


Global English, Global Culture
English as a global language is viewed in many ways by different people – some view it as a
language of economic opportunity, whereas others see it as a mechanism for structuring
inequality between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest
...
However, this gave rise to the problem of effective communication among the
peoples of new Europe
...
Unfortunately, Latin created barriers of access to knowledge by the
unlearned, thus serving as a ‘secret language’
...

As Latin declined in the 17th century, many scholars proposed an artificial language that
could represent all new ideas and serve as a universal language
...
Interest slackened as the 18th century brought French s an
international language
...
g
...

Such languages as Esperanto were created, serving as auxiliary languages
...

These auxiliary languages were seen as not economically or culturally privileging one
country
...
It should not be used as a vehicle for cultural values – i
...
literature
...
After the First World War, people began to worry – English
was more dominant and could aggravate rivalries between European nations
...
At this
time, the British Empire covered ’one fifth of the Earth’s land surface, making English the
administrative language for a third of the world’s population
...
By the time of World War II, French and
German was in no position to resist the rise of English
...

After the First World War, the United Nations gave 6 languages official status: Arabic,
Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish
...


European history provides many cultural resources from which resistance to English and
English cultural products can be built
...

The EU itself was designed precisely to ensure that none of Europe’s main languages took
undue precedence over others
...

The increase of countries in the EU has made complex patterns in language use with an
increase in both official and non-0official languages
...

By the turn of the 21st century, English was used predominantly by the EU with English as
the most studied foreign language at school
...
France is a lingua franca among many ex-colonies in Africa, Arabic is used widely in
Asia and Africa and Russian is used in the Commonwealth of Independent States
...
Each country has differences in how people
speak English and what alternative languages they have
...
g
...

Nevertheless, English is clearly at the apex of political, economical and cultural hierarchy of
languages in the world
...

In language hierarchies predicted for 2050, more languages appear in the top layer –
Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic appear to join English
...
Moreover, several thousand world languages will be lost
...
The majority
of thee languages are located in a few countries, spoken by small groups of people with
little political or cultural power
...
g
...
1% of the world’s population
...

Such small communities are often targeted by development agencies for ‘modernisation’
and improvement
...
When a language is chosen for mega –
communication, the smaller communication zones wither away, resulting in loss of culture
...

The English language is rarely the direct cause of such language loss – rather a highly
multilingual hierarchy exists in these countries
...
Language shift usually occurs
from a small, low-status vernacular to one of the languages higher in the hierarchy
...
Africa noted similar patterns with many majority African languages
displacing minority ones rather than English
...

Particularly in Australia, language loss can be attributed to several factors:
1
...
Aboriginal choice – reluctant choice to speak English
3
...
A shift in social domains led to lesser use of indigenous languages
...
Media pressure – English used exclusively in media
...
Language X is used for everything with a second language slightly known
...
Some people still have X as their first language but many have English instead, in its
traditional form
...
Only a few people have X as a first language
...

4
...
Most speak English
...
Everyone speaks English – a few words from X are carried over
...
Some see it
as ‘converging’ towards Mc Communication, whereas others see English as propelling
individuals into economic and social advantage
...
However, it is rarely uniformly
available – in Sri Lanka, for example, English is still controlled by the middle-class who limits
its availability and mock those who speak it with an accent or dialect
...


Many students learn English in an ‘acquisition poor environment’ where the teacher is not
fully proficient in the language, where classrooms are under-equipped and where there is
not a real communicative need for English in the community
...
Secondly, educational policy determines how successful speakers of the
lesser-used languages are within the education system
...
For example, Papua New Guinea has
shifted over a 10 year period from an English – only educational system to one that used a
quarter of the 800 local languages
...

It has encouraged international travel, as well as an increase in global electronic media
...

Expansion began with the telegraph that coincided with the development of the railway in
Britain
...

Britain soon dominated global telegraph networks due to their colonial possessions,
industrial expansion and development of financial systems
...
It also led to
English as a lingua franca in terms of trade and services
...
This remains true today with satellites controlled
namely by the USA
...

Improved global communication also increases the number of interactions between
speakers of different languages
...
In many cases, that is English
...

Improved technology also allowed public communication with the first radio broadcasts
made in the 1920’s
...

Terrestrial media has long served a function of constructing a sense of shared national
identity and culture
...
Secondly, many satellite channels take films and
programmes from the global market, reflecting a new global culture
...
Centrifugal forces such as the local political regime, the considerable
linguistic diversity and the cultural and historical diversity across regions mean any straight
forward multinational corporate control is undermined
...
The development of
‘phoenix’ was a key vehicle to success as it reflected both Western and local diverse Chinese
values and interests
...
In Europe, many programmes are dubbed and
according to EU law, over 50% of programmes must be European in origin
...
There are ways for
languages and cultures to be sustained but kept safely in a position of less cultural and
economic power

---