Language Change - Words that have changed diachronically

Nice - From the latin "nescire", originally meaning "to be ignorant" and "to be silly", but today means "to be pleasant". "Nice" has undergone amelioration, as it has shifted from having a negative meaning, to meaning something a lot more positive. It could be said that the essence of the word has ranged from foolish and cowardly to elegant and effeminate.

Investigative Piece Introduction

Hypothesis: "Women will express more feelings based ideas in written language than men, who will express more informative based language."

Introduction:

For my investigative piece I will be looking at the difference theory and how it is applied to modern day forms of communication. We can learn about how gender language stereotypes can be portrayed and represented by analysing the language use of each. There are many theories and hypotheses that can be tested within this aspect of language, however for this essay I will be focusing on the difference model. This consists of a series of six contrasts that display the most common ways that male and female speakers may differ. These are: status vs support, independence vs intimacy, advice vs understanding, information vs feelings, orders vs proposals and conflict vs compromise. With the data I have collected, I plan to base my findings on the hypothesis of information vs feelings in particular. To test this, I have collected a substantial and reliable amount of data including portions of social media accounts from a variety of British bloggers. To make the data fair and true, I took an equal amount of examples from three males and four females. From this I am able to compare and contrast the amount of information-type statuses compared to those that show feeling. For this hypothesis, perhaps the  most general theory is that men typically use more information messages and women use more feelings, and in this piece I will consider theories and ideas that both support and oppose this view.

Children's Writing - Theory

Theory 1: B.M. KROLL 1981

4 stages in the development of writing.  

Stage 1: PREPAROTARY STAGE

• Masters the basic motor skills needed to write
• Learns the basic principles of the spelling system.

Stage 2: CONSOLIDATION STAGE (age up to 6)

• Child writes in the same way it speaks.
• Uses short declarative sentences which include mainly ‘and’ conjunctions.
• Incomplete sentences as they don’t know how to finish the sentence off.

Stage 3: DIFFERENTIATION STAGE (age up to 9)

• Child becomes aware of the difference between speaking and writing.
• Recognises the different writing styles available e.g. letter, essay.
• Lots of mistakes.
• Use writing guides and frameworks to structure work.
• Write to reflect thoughts and feelings.

Stage 4: INTEGRATION STAGE (12+)

• Child develops a personal style.
• Child understands that you can change your style according to audience and purpose.

Theory 2: DOCTOR CATHY BARCLAY 1996

7 stages to a child's developing its writing skills.  

Stage 1: SCRIBBLING STAGE

• Random marks on a page
• Writing and scribbles are accompanied by speaking

Stage 2: MOCK HANDWRITING STAGE

• Writing + drawings
• Produce wavy lines which is their understanding of lineation
• Cursive writing

Stage 3: MOCK LETTERS

• Letters are separate things.

Stage 4: CONVENTIONAL LETTERS

• Usually involves writing the name as the first word.
• Child usually puts letters on a page but is able to read it as words.

Stage 5: INVENTED SPELLING STAGE

• Child spells in the way they understand the word should be spelt- own way.

Stage 6: APPROPRIATE/ PHONETIC SPELLING STAGE

• Attach spelling with sounds.

Stage 7: CORRECT SPELLING STAGE

• Are able to spell most words.

Zachy Transcript Analysis

By looking at two comparable and reliable transcripts, we can depict certain factors and features that will tell us something about child language acquisition (CLA). First of all, the first transcript called "Drawing a banana" features Zachy as a 2 and 4 month year, talking to his mother about his day and what he was currently doing at the time. Immediately we notice that the conversation features mainly local topics, focusing more on the things that Zach is more likely to know and have an interest in talking about. This is clearly due to the fact that he is of such a young age and will not have the wider knowledge to talk about such unfamiliar and complex topics. Also, it is worth noting that H uses a lot more interrogatives than Z, and the opposite goes for declaratives. Looking further into the content of the two sentence moods, it appears that most of Halla's interrogatives double as an echoing interrogative. This means that H is repeating what Z has said to reassure and prompt him to go on. This encourages Zachy to talk more during the conversation, perhaps explaining why his utterances are slightly more advanced than his age suggests. His age of 28 months at the time of the transcript puts him in the telegraphic stage (three and more words combined), however his speech shows signs of a more post telegraphic development (more complex combinations). For example Zach says "I don't know (0.5) where's my little pad gone?". The use of the pronoun "I" and the adjective "little" show that Zach is already beyond the point of using simple 2/3 words to express himself by adding this more mature sense of detail.

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age.
In 1967 Eric Lenneberg released a widely influential book based on his research popularizing the notion that if language is not learned before an early age – usually estimated at 4 to 6 years – a child’s ability to learn any language becomes greatly compromised, or disappears altogether.  Though this research has been advocated for and debated against by linguistic giants such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, the evidence from Lenneberg and others is flimsy, draws extensively from widely divergent examples of feral children, and is largely theoretical.
This hypothesis was originally proposed by Penfield and Roberts (1959) and followed up by Lenneberg (1967) who suggested that it could be extended to the second language acquisition. Subsequent studies all found the same result that second language learning performance correlates negatively with the age at which the learning begins prior to puberty.

Key Points

• Lenneberg theorized that the acquisition of language is an innate process determined by biological factors which limit the critical period for acquisition of a language from roughly two years of age to puberty.

• Lenneberg believed that after lateralization (a process by which the two sides of the brain develop specialized functions), the brain loses plasticity.

• Lenneberg claimed that lateralization of the language function is normally completed at puberty, making post adolescent language acquisition difficult.

Child Language Acquisition Stages

Language acquisition for small children occur in stages...

• Babbling (apx 6 months) - Child produces the full range of possible speech sounds, even those which do not occur in speech heard in immediate environment, (the target language) and which s/he may later find "impossible" to reproduce when learning a foreign language.
• Holophrastic/One word stage (apx 12-14 months) - the words produced in holophrastic speech are not just any words. For example you get: cookie drink bad fast go yes/no But never: *in *the *and
• Two word stage (apx 24 months) - Still virtually no closed class words: some pronouns, especially me/you.
• Telegraphic Speech - no 3-word stage -basically English sentences, but still without closed class items. -some affixes (past tense marker, plural) -SVO word order (almost invariable) -constant changing/adding of rules

Sources: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/acq.html

Paper 2 - Language and Gender Resources

Theorists flashcards

https://quizlet.com/9012037/language-and-gender-theorists-flash-cards/alphabetical

Language and gender in detail

https://sites.google.com/site/englishatknutsford/home/english-language-as-a2/language-and-gender/language-and-gender-the-theorists