Sunday, May 27, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
Sociolinguistics, Neurolinguistics & Stylistics
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive
study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the
way language is used, and the effects of
language use on society.
Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in
that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the
language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society.
Sociolinguistics overlaps to a
considerable degree with pragmatics. It is
historically closely related to linguistic
anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has
even been questioned recently.
It also studies how language varieties differ
between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc. and how creation and
adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic classes.
As the usage of a language varies from
place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and these sociolects are what sociolinguistics
studies.
The social aspects of language were in
the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s,
and also by Gauchat in Switzerland US and Basil Bernstein in the UK
Applications of sociolinguistics
For example, a sociolinguist might
determine through study of social attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered
appropriate language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists
might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect
much as dialectologists would
study the same for a regional dialect.
The study of language variation is
concerned with social constraints determining
language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use
of different varieties of language in different social situations.
William Labov is often regarded as the
founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is especially noted for
introducing the quantitative study of language variation and
change, making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline.
This vast field of inquiry requires and
combines insights from a number of disciplines, including linguistics,
sociology, psychology and anthropology.
Sociolinguistics examines the interplay
of language and society, with language as the starting point. Variation is the
key concept, applied to language itself and to its use. The basic premise of
sociolinguistics is that language is variable and changing. As a result,
language is not homogeneous — not for the individual user and not within or
among groups of speakers who use the same language.
By studying written records,
sociolinguists also examine how language and society have interacted in the
past. For example, they have tabulated the frequency of the singular
pronoun thou and its replacement you in dated hand-written
or printed documents and correlated changes in frequency with changes in class
structure in 16th and 17th century England
This is historical sociolinguistics: the
study of relationship between changes in society and changes in language over a
period of time.
Stylistics
Stylistics can be by and large
described as the study of style of language usage in different contexts, either
linguistic, or situational. Yet, it seems that due to the complex history and
variety of investigated issues of this study it is difficult to state precisely
what stylistics is, and to mark clear boundaries between it and other branches
of linguistics which deal with text analysis.
What has been the primary interest of
stylistics for years is the analysis of the type, fluctuation, or the reason
for choosing a given style as in any language a single thought can be expressed
in a number of ways depending on connotations, or desired result that the
message is to produce. Therefore, stylistics is concerned with the examination
of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological properties
and discursive devices.
It might seem that the same issues are
investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case,
however sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant
on the social class, gender, age, etc, while stylistics is more interested in
the significance of function that the style fulfills.
Moreover, stylistics examines oral and
written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic linguistic
properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the texts. Thus,
it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to discourse analysis, in particular critical
discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Owing to the fact that at the
beginning of the development of this study the major part of the stylistic
investigation was concerned with the analysis of literary texts it is sometimes
called literary linguistics, or literary stylistics.
Nowadays, however, linguists study
various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as well as novels and
advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the text types is
discriminated and thought to be more important than others. In addition to
that, in the recent years so called ‘media-discourses’ such as films, news
reports, song lyrics and political speeches have all been within the scope of
interest of stylistics.
Each text scrutinized by stylistics can
be viewed from different angles and as fulfilling at least a few functions.
Thus, it is said that texts have interpersonal function, ideational function
and textual function. When describing a function several issues are taken into
consideration. Therefore, interpersonal function is all about the
relationship that the text is establishing with its recipients, the use of
either personal or impersonal pronouns is analyzed, as well as the use of
speech acts, together with the tone and mood of the statement.
When describing the ideational
function linguists are concerned with the means of representing the reality by
the text, the way the participants are represented, as well as the arrangement
of information in clauses and sentences. The textual function is the
reference of sentences forwards and backwards which makes the text cohesive and
coherent, but also other discursive devices such as ellipsis, repetition,
anaphora are studied. In addition to that the effectiveness of chosen stylistic
properties of the texts are analyzed in order to determine their suitability to
the perceived function, or contribution to overall interpretation.
Linguists dealing with a sub-branch of
stylistics called pedagogical stylistics support the view that this field of
study helps learners to develop better foreign language competence. What is
more, it is thought that being acquainted with stylistics makes student more
aware of certain features of language and to implement the knowledge in their
language production on all levels: phonological, grammatical, lexical and
discursive. Also empirical findings support the view that stylistics helps
students improve their reading and writing skills.
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of
the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension,
production, and acquisition of language.
Much work in neurolinguistics is informed
by models in psycholinguistics and
theoretical
linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can
implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are
necessary in producing and comprehending language
Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in
the development in the 19th century of aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits (aphasias) occurring as the result of brain damage. Aphasiology attempts to
correlate structure to function by analyzing the effect of brain injuries on
language processing. One of the first people to draw a connection between
a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca, a French surgeon who conducted autopsies on
numerous individuals who had speaking deficiencies, and found that most of them
had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal lobe, in an area now known as Broca's area.
Phrenologists had made the claim in the
early 19th century that different brain regions carried out different functions
and that language was mostly controlled by the frontal regions of the brain,
but Broca's research was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for
such a relationship, and has been described as
"epoch-making" and "pivotal" to the fields of
neurolinguistics and cognitive science. Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke's area is named, proposed that
different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks,
with Broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's
area handling auditory speech comprehension.
The work of Broca and Wernicke
established the field of aphasiology and the idea that language can be studied
through examining physical characteristics of the brain.
Early
work in aphasiology also benefited from the early twentieth-century work
of Korbinian Brodmann,
who "mapped" the surface of the brain, dividing it up into numbered
areas based on each area's cytoarchitecture (cell structure) and
function; these areas, known as Brodmann areas, are still widely used in
neuroscience today.
The coining of the term
"neurolinguistics" has been attributed to Harry Whitaker, who founded
the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985
Interaction with other fields
Neurolinguistics is closely related to
the field of psycholinguistics,
which seeks to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms of language by employing the
traditional techniques of experimental
psychology; today, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theories
often inform one another, and there is much collaboration between the two
fields.
Bibliography
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Grammatical Cases of Charles Fillmore & Structural Semantics of William Chafe
Grammatical
Cases of Charles Fillmore
Charles J. Fillmore (born 1929) is an American
linguist, and an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University
of California , Berkeley
He was one of the first linguists to introduce a
representation of linguistic knowledge that blurred this strong distinction
between syntactic and semantic knowledge of a language. He introduced what was
termed case structure grammar and this representation subsequently had
considerable influence on psychologists as well as computational linguists.
Grammar Case is a system of linguistic analysis,
focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc.,
of a verb and the grammatical context it requires.
The system was created by the American linguist
Charles J. Fillmore in (1968), in the context of Transformational Grammar. This
theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the
combination of deep cases (i.e. semantic roles) Agent, Object, Benefactor,
Location or Instrument which are required by a specific verb.
According to Fillmore, each verb selects a certain
number of deep cases which form its case frame. Thus, a case frame describes
important aspects of semantic valency, of verbs, adjectives and nouns.
Case frames are subject to certain constraints, such as that a deep case can occur only once per sentence. Some of the cases are obligatory and others are optional. Obligatory cases may not be deleted, at the risk of producing ungrammatical sentences.
The case structure representation served to inspire
the development of what was termed a frame-based representation in AI
research. Within a frame-base architecture it is quite natural to have these
type of inferences triggered by the representation of the sentence. (For those
familiar with certain types of Object Oriented programming language; the
frame-based architecture in AI was a somewhat more complicated and elaborated
programming environment.)
One of the consistent findings in human sentence
understanding is that we seem to draw these inferences automatically. And, we
rarely remember whether or not such information was explicitly stated in the
sentence. This observation is consistent with some of the features of a
frame-based representation as suggested by case structure grammar
Another aspect of the case grammar representation is
that it can be effectively used to parse incomplete or noisy sentences. For
example, while John gave book is not grammatical; it is still
possible to create an appropriate case grammar parse of this string of words.
However, case grammar is not a particularly good representation for use in
parsing sentences that involve complex syntactic constructions. The web page on
representing textual information will give you some appreciation of this
difficulty.
Structural Semantics according to William
Chafe´s perspective
Structural Semantics is the study of relationships
between the meanings of terms within a sentence, and how meaning can be
composed from smaller elements. However, some critical theorists suggest
that meaning is only divided into smaller structural units via its regulation
in concrete social interactions; outside of these interactions language may
become meaningless.
In the approaches labelled
"Structural semantics" by cognitive linguists, word meanings,
or lexical meanings can
be broken down into atomic semantic features, which are in a way the distinctive properties of the
meaning of a word.
In accordance with the objectivist bias
of structural semantics, semantic features are believed to refer to actual
properties, objects or relations in the exterior world.
Syntactic description has usually taken
the sentence to be its basic unit of organization, although probably no one
would deny that systematic constraints exist across sentence boundaries as
well.
From time to time some attention has been
given to “discourse” structure, but the structure of the sentences has seemed
to exhibit a kind of closure which allows it to be investigated in relative, if
not complete, independence.
Language seen from a semantic
perspective, intersentential constraints play a role that is probably more
important than under other views of language, for a number of the limitations
which cross sentence boundaries are clearly semantic in nature.
The term sentence provides a convenient
way of referring to a verb and its accompanying nouns, the status of sentence
as an independent structural entity is doubtful. There seems no need for some
independent symbol as the starting point for generation of sentences, the verb
is all the starting point needed.
A sentence is either a verb alone, a verb
accompanied by one or more nouns, or a configuration of this kind to which one
ore more coordinate or subordinate verbs have been added.
Bibliography
- http://www-rci.rutgers.edu/~cfs/305_html/Understanding/CaseGram1.html
- http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_Charles_Fillmore's_theory_of_case_grammar
- http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/cauce/pdf/cauce05/cauce_05_011.pdf
- http://www.scribd.com/doc/38162791/Gramatica-de-Casos-Charles-Fillmore
- http://dspace.uah.es/jspui/bitstream/10017/7408/1/gramatica_montaner_REALE_1997.pdf
- http://my.ilstu.edu/~jrbaldw/370/Meaning.htm
- http://cogling.wikia.com/wiki/Structural_semantics
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Structural-semantics/111039678946352
- Chafe, W. Meaning and the structure of language. University of
Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1970, capítulo IX
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Quiz! American Structuralism Glossary
Check out this quiz!
It is about the glossary of American Structuralism
American Structuralism - QuizRevolution.com
It is about the glossary of American Structuralism
American Structuralism - QuizRevolution.com
Monday, April 23, 2012
Glossary : American Structuralism
Glossary
B: inside speakers
A: outisde speakers
C: speech
Mere: Is a syntcategorematic expression: it lacks
both sense and reference; is not quantifiable, and does not function as subject
or predicate in falsifiable assertions. It is used to inform about attitudes,
not facts.
Objectivity: It refers to the connection between the
outside speakers, inside speakers and the speech.
Subjective: The connection is only between inside
speakers and speech, excluding the outside speakers.
Mentalism: It assumes that there are factors in mental
operations inside speakers exempt from physical laws in the empirical realm
outside speakers. However inside speaker was affected by outside speaker, this
precluded physical determination of inherited language conventions speech by
the physical constitution of outside speakers. It opposes: wholes or parts to
material and formal principles, mind to brain, functions of the mind to triggering
of the nervous system, understanding to experiencing, deciding to reacting,
preferring to being reinforced, speaking to uttering, heroism or insanity to
environmental conditioning.
It is being as dualistic because it
recognizes two kinds (mental and material) of data, experience, perception,
insight, causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study.
Mechanism: Takes it for granted that there is a casual continuity from
outside speakers, through inside speakers to speech.
Behaviorism: It offered and objective approach. It
assumed the fundamental identity of physically determined speech-behavior with
any other kind of nonlinguistic outside speakers-behavior. But it was conceded
that while all inside speakers-behavior is the immediate consequence of outside
speakers´ factors, speech-behavior is mediate.
Behaviorism is monistic because it admits
only a single kind of data, erroneously distinguished by mentalists into
experience, insight, perception, causality, evidence, explanation, study goal
and method of study.
Language:
The totality of mutually
effective substitute responses.
Utterance:
An act of speech.
Speech-Community: It refers to any community which speaks
the same language
Language: The total of utterances that can be made in
a speech- community.
Same:
It refers to what is alike.
Forms: The vocal features common to same or partly
same utterances.
Meanings:
The corresponding
stimulus-reaction- features.
Morpheme: The minimum form.
Sememe: The meaning of the morpheme.
Free:
A form which may be an
utterance.
Bound: A form which is not free.
Word: A form which has more than one morpheme.
Phrase: A
non-minimum free form.
Formative: A bound form which is part of a word.
Phoneme:
A minimum same of vocal
feature.
Homonyms: Different forms which are alike as to
phonemes.
Constructional
meaning: the corresponding
stimulus- reaction features.
Morphologic
construction: The
construction of formatives in a word.
Syntactic
construction: The
construction of free forms in a phase.
Sentence:
a maximum construction in
any utterance.
Functional
meaning: the meaning of a
position.
Functions: positions in which a form occurs.
Form-class: All forms having the same functions.
Class-
meaning: the functional
meaning in which the forms of a form-class appear.
Categories:
the functional meanings and
class-meanings of a language.
Word-class: a form-class of words.
BEHAVIORAL CORRELATES FOR DETERMINING
TRADITIONAL CONCERNS ABOUT LANGUAGE:
Literary
standard: Is accessible
though general or personal educational effort transcends geographic and social
barriers, and is used on occasions described as formal.
Colloquial
standard: Is observed in
situations lacking formal behaviors among observably privileged classes within
a larger speck community.
Provincial
standard: Is observed among those remote geographically
from the formative environments of cultural centers.
Sub-standard
speech behavior: Is found among those who must interact daily
as peers with each other, but only occasionally, and as subordinates to the
privileged: their goals, satisfactions, reinforcement and opportunities differ
markedly from those of standards speakers.
Local
dialect: Is that of an interacting group with which
others have so little contact that dialect speakers are incomprehensible
without considerable attention.
Phonetics:
Is the branch of science
that deals with the sound-production. It provides an objective record of gross
acoustic features, only part of which are distinctive for particular languages,
while phonology or practical phonetics, determines which features are the
distinctive ones.
Acting
as though: An empirical procedure called the minimal pair
test.
Modification:
Presumes some standard from
which a departure is made, and the criteria for establishing the base can vary,
legitimately or inconsistently.
Duration:
The relative length of time
through which the vocal organs are kept in a position.
Stress:
It consists in greater
amplitude of sound waves and is produce by means of more energetic movements,
which can vary in the manner of application, or where increase of loudness sets
in.
Pitch:
Frequency of vibration in
the musical sound of the voice.
Palatalization:
During the production of a
consonant, the tongue and lips take up, as far as compatible with the main
features of the phoneme, the position of a front vowel.
Velarization:
Refers to the process in
which the tongue is retracted as far a back vowel-
Labialized:
When the lips are rounded
during the production of the consonants.
Labiovelarized:
The manner in which the
vocal organs pass from inactivity to the formation of a phoneme, or from the
formation of one phoneme to that of the next, or from the formation of a
phoneme to inactivity.
Reference:
Is the static relation,
dynamic process or action linking speech to outside speakers, mediated by
inside speakers.
Sense:
The state, process or
action within inside speakers, by which speech is related to outside speakers.
Referent:
Is the thing. A bit of
objective outside speakers or subjective inside speakers now regarded as part
of speech.
Denotation
Is reference.
Connotation:
Is a subjective or
socialized relation of the referent for speaker to other referents and
properties.
Meaning
of a linguistic form: The
situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth
in the hearer.
Displaced
speech: A speaks of absent
apples to inside speaker who relay´s outside speaker´s message to speech.
Apple:
Lying, irony, jesting,
poetry, narrative fiction and the like.
Language:
Is the expression of ideas,
feelings, or volitions.
Hypostasis:
Is closely related to
quotation, the repetition of a speech, and like onomatopoeia, consists in
deviations from the ordinary tie-up of phonetic form with dictionary meaning,
which still shows considerable complexity.
Synchronic
linguistic description: Proceeds
on the counter-factual assumption of constant and stable forms paired with
meanings within an unchanging speech-community, signaled through linguistic
forms containing a discrete number of combinable phonemic contrasts.
Taxeme:
A simple feature of
grammatical arrangement.
Tagmemes:
Meaningful units of
grammatical form.
Episemes:
The meaning of tagmemes.
Sandhi:
Is the label for features
of modulation and phonetic modification important to many syntactic structures.
Endocentric:
When free forms combining
can be said to produce a resultant phrase, of which the form-class of one
member may be determinative of the phrase´s grammatical behavior.
Exocentric: When
the phrase pr construction does not follow the grammatical behavior of either
constituent.
American Structuralism
AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM
There was especially good reason to take this
point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from
the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian
languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken
by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became
extinct, would be permanently inaccessible.
Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz
Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory
of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound
methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were
also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by
analyzing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more
familiar Indo-European languages.
After Boas, the two most influential American
linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949).
Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and
linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day
in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the
Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was
left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a
sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since
the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that
language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian
hypothesis.
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914,Bloomfield Bloomfield Bloomfield
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914,
Another characteristic feature, one that was to
be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of
"discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied more or less
mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate
phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts.
Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with
differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks published
during the 1950s.
NORTH
AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM CENTERS IN WHAT PEOPLE ACTUALLY SAY.
MAIN
TENETS
- Linguistic
is a descriptive science.
- the
primary form of the language is the spoken one.
- Every
language is a system on its own right.
- Language
is a system in which smaller units arrange systematically to form larger
ones
- Meaning
should not be part of linguistic analysis
- The
procedures to determine the units in language should be objective and
rigorous.
- Language
is observable speech, not knowledge.
Structuralism proposes the idea that many
phenomena do not occur in isolation, but instead occur in relation to each
other, and that all related phenomena are part of a whole with a definite, but
not necessarily defined, structure.
1.1 AMERICAN STRUCTURALISM : L. BLOOMFIELD
1.1.1.BEHAVIORISM AND SCIENCE
Behaviorism was a school of psychology. According to this school
science can only deal with physical facts. Statements must be based on these
physical characteristics. Thus, science must observe, describe physical facts
and induce descriptive generalizations.
1.1.2. LANGUAGE : STIMULUS AND RESPONSE
Human behaviour is studied in terms of stimulus and response,
consequently linguistic behaviour becomes also a pattern of stimulus and
response, where language plays a mediating role.
1.1.3. THE METHOD AND LIMITATIONS
Behaviorist linguists start their studies by recording speech, and
these samples will become the only basis for the study of language, in the form
of sphich corpus. Speech will be divided into sound segments and they will
observe these segments in their linguistic context. Finally, they will classify
those segments according to their distribution. However, this method made the
study of meaning very complex and probably outside the domain of linguistics,
and this is the main behaviorist limitation.
1.2. AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN STRUCTURALISM
American and European structuralism had the same objective:
describe and classify linguistic units, though they do not share the same
perspective. European structuralists deal with Saussure's notion of langue,
whereas Americans' perspective derived from the limitations of their
behaviorist method.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Thursday, March 29, 2012
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
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
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.
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