Title Midterm Prep.pdf ✅

- Communicative competence: knowing a language also means knowing how to use that language, since speakers know not only how to form sentences but also how to use them appropriately Variation (people never speak in the same way) - There is variation across speakers, that is, reflections of different ways that people speak in different regions or social groups, but also variation within the speech of a single speaker. - Performance of different speakers - The performance of the same speaker in different contexts Ex: which one below is correct? I haven't got a book. I don't have a book. => all are correct I ain't got a book. Ex: British accent (pronunciation) and dialects (both pronunciation vocabulary and grammar) + Standard British accent - The Queen's English - RP (in books) + Cockney dialect -> invent new word + Estuary English dialect + Yorkshire dialect + Northern Irish dialect + ... Fun facts about Cockney dialects ● Spoken by people who live in the East-end of London ● Most notable: the Cockney rhyming slang ● Slang: Apples and pears to refer to stairs Loaf of bread to refer to head Trouble and strife to refer to wife => TV shows help make the slangs become mainstream and population - The language we use in everyday living is remarkably varied - There is variation across speakers, as well as within the speech of a single speaker - People constantly exploit variation within the languages they speak for a wide variety of purposes Exercise: variation in greetings (think for midterm) Speakers and their groups Identity (linguistic construction of membership)
- Identities are not fixed attributes of people or groups but are dynamically constructed aspects which emerge through discourse and social behavior - Identity is defined as the linguistic construction of membership in one or more social groups or categories" (Kroskrity 2000, 111) *secondary students still do not know how to match identity to other groups, so we see that they behave the same to friends, teachers, adults,...* - Our identities are fluid (flexible) and we do not have a single identity but multiple levels of identity, and shifting and sometimes even conflicting identities which emerge in different contexts _ discuss conflicting identities (in one situation that two or more identities conflict) => in a car, with a colleagues and child, sometimes use the language that belongs to the colleagues identity, immediately have to change because of the child Power - power influences how we choose to identify by ourselves and how we form groups with others - Power is "the ability to control events in order to achieve one's aims" (Tollefson 2006, 46) and is also “the control someone has over the outcomes of others” Solidarity - Solidarity refers to the motivations which cause individual to act together (because you want to feel like you are a group, so you need to maintain solidarity) - And you need to act together to feel a common bond which influences the social actions and then the languages (the language you use will be influenced by that) Idiolects - ways of speaking of each person (think of your own idiolect: background, knowledge, living conditions,...) Direction of influence - There are several possible relationships between language and culture - One is that social structure may either influence or determine linguistic structure and/or behavior. Example: age-grading phenomenon => young children speak differently from older children => older children speak differently from adults => age influence language use