Investigation: Prescriptive or Descriptive language?

Outline of my investigation about the use of language

1. Identifying the phenomenon

2. Objectives

3. Contextual framework

4. Theoretical framework

4.1 What is language?

4.2 Descriptive and prescriptive language.

4.3 Language system and language behavior

4.4 Saussure´s concepts: “langue” and “parole”.

4.5 Pronouns of Address

5. Hypothesis

1. Identifying the phenomenon

Differences between the use of formal (prescriptive) language and informal (descriptive) language by middle class young adults and adults.

One prove of this is the difference in the use of tú and usted to address different people that is related to them.

2. Objectives

The purpose is to find out the reasons for young adults and adults to use formal or informal language and also in which situations they choose to use one of them or both.

 Another objective is to discover if there is any connection between the answers of these groups and if there has been a big change from one generation to another.

3. Contextual framework

The research and observation will be made in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and also with people of my environment such as family, friends which are from the middle class and approximately the same educational level between them.

The young adults are studying their degree and some of them are working, and the adults all of them have finished their degree and are workers or have been involved in that environment; that is really important because the purpose is to find the similarities but also the differences and for these two aspects they must have studied a degree.

Young adults must be between 18 and 24 years old, approximately the ages in which they are studying and the adults between 40 and 50 years old, that is in a certain way the range of ages of their parents.

4. Theoretical framework

First, is necessary to identify which concepts are related to the investigation.

4.1 What is language?

According to Sapir, language is a method used by humans, it is based on oral and written communication. This method was created in order to express humans´ needs.

According to Block and Trager it is a system of vocal symbols that change according to the speech community and people use this system to interact with others.

From Chomsky´s point of view, language consists on a group of sentences but these sentences are not finite, they have length and are compound by a set of infinite elements.

Finally Robins says that language is a system of symbols that a group of people accept and decide to use and that is also arbitrary.

4.2 Descriptive and prescriptive language.

According to Lyons, the prescriptive language is the correct way to speak or to use language; it represents the language that follows all the rules or norms, that is why it is also called normative. Everything in it is defined.

On the other hand, the descriptive language represents the one that is used by the society and follows all the rules that the speech community decided to have in their own language.

4.3 Language system and language behavior

According to Lyons, language behavior is like and activity, it is something that you can see and observe by the people that is involved in this interactions but also by spectators.

This language behavior is interrelated to the concepts of competence and performance. It means that in order to communicate and interact through language, we must know our language and have the cognitive ability to use it. For being able to perform, we must be competent but being competent is not always related to the way in which we perform, there are many other things involved.

4.4 Saussure´s concepts: “langue” and “parole”.

Saussure gave the term “langue” to the language particularly as a system and the term “parole” he used it to refer to the colloquial way of speaking by a specific group of people.

Something that is important to mention is that he realized that the individual behavior has an important role in linguistic changes that come to create the descriptive language or “parole”

4.5 Pronouns of Address

In Spanish language, we use polite (v- usted) and familiar (T- tú) pronouns of address.

The differences started in Latin in the last period of Roman Empire or early Middle Ages. There are some aspects to take on consideration in order to understand the reasons for these differences.

• Power and solidarity
• Non-reciprocal use-difference of status
• A socially superior or more powerful person will address his/her inferiors familiarly but not viceversa
• It is culture dependant.

5. Hypothesis

My hypothesis consists in the assumption of how prescriptive and descriptive languages change in their use and application depending on the age of the people that is using them. And also it hope this research help me to prove that descriptive or informal language is nowadays more used in society by younger people in this case young adults and in many different environments and that prescriptive language is only used in very specific and limited situations in our daily life.

Jigsaw puzzle: Copenhagen School

Copenhagen School jigsaw puzzle game » jigsaw puzzle

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Copenhagen School

Copenhagen School basic information

This is a mind map that I did searching information on the Internet about the Copenhagen School principles and contributors.


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Bibliography



An outline of the history of linguistics. http://mcgregor.continuumbooks.net/media/1/history_outline.pdf
Campbell, L. (2001), "The history of  linguistics", In M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller (eds), The Handook of Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 81-104
Círculo Lingüístico de Copenhague
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18866441/Circulo-Linguistico-de-Copenhague
FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS The Copenhagen School
http://wylwenwnd.blogspot.com/2011/11/functional-linguistics-copenhagen.html 2/nov/11

Word search: The prague school

In this word search game you must find the names of the most important contributors to the Prague School investigaction

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Prague School

Functional linguistics: the Prague School

Mathesius started a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars who made discussions and then started being recognized as the “Prague School”. They saw language in terms of function and they analyzed it with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the whole language. This was the difference between American descriptivists and Prague School linguists.

For Prague School, language is not a set of elements that have nothing to do between them, in fact they thought that all these elements determined the nature of others and all of them are interrelated. These linguists were trying to explain not only what the language is but also they why, which were the reasons for language to be the way it is.
According to Mathesius, the need for continuity means that a sentence will commonly fall into two parts: theme, which refers to something about which the hearer already knows, and the rheme, which states some new fact about that given topic.

The notion of Functional Sentence Perspective was developed by the Prague scholars. They gave importance to using ideas and the motivations to explain structural differences between languages.

Let see a consideration of functional approach to phonology, as exemplified in the work or Trubetzkoy. He was one of the members of the Prague School not based in Czechoslovakia.
Trubetzkoyan phonology gives a central role to the phoneme but the School was interested primarily in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes. 
In his book, the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology, which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has. He distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition.
He was conscious of that fact that the functions of speech are not limited to express explicit messages; so he divided these functions with other colleagues in: representation function, expressive function and the conative function.


On the other hand, Mathesius worked on what has been translated as “linguistic characterology”, which aimed to enable one to discuss what kind of grammar a language has.


Jacobson has written a great deal, for instance, on the structuralist approach to literature; the most important aspect of Jacobson´s work is his phonological theory. We was interested in they analysis of phonemes into their component features rather than in the distribution of phonemes. The essence of his approach is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal “psychological system” of sound underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sound observed by the phonetician.

The descriptivists emphasized that languages differ unpredictably in the particular phonetic parameters which they utilize distinctively, and in the number of values which they distinguish on parameters which are physically continuous and they tended to be reluctant to admit that any sound which can be found in some language might nevertheless be regarded as a difficult sound in any absolute sense.


On the other hand, for Jakobson only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role and that there are only twelve features that have these characteristic. We can understand by distinctive “able to be used distinctively in a human language.

An important part of this theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulatory parameters are “psychologically equivalent”. The notion that the universal distinctive features are organized into a innate hierarchy of relative importance appeared in one of his books.


He made his point that a study of children´s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

One characteristics of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative systems, registers or styles, where American Descriptivists tended to insist on treating a language as a singly unitary system.

Due to their functional approach, Prague scholars were specially interested in the way that a language provides a speaker with a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social settings.

Finally we have to mention that Saussure stressed the social nature of language, and he insisted that linguistics as a social science must ignore historical data because for the speaker, the history of his language does not exist.  The Prague School and Labov are among the linguists who they have ended by destroying Saussure´s sharp separation between synchronic and diachronic study.

Hangman: The study of language

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The study of language hangman game » make hangman

The study of language

These following maps contain information about the different stages through which the study of language has passed over the years

Also they mention some of the most important researchers, like Sapir, Chomsky and Saussure, that defined the branches of linguistics and made crucial contributions to the study of language, starting with Plato and Aristotle, and including the latest researches.