Text Language

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/sep/11/schools.uk1

How is language issue represented?

Represented positively:

·       Semantic field of benefiting and improving, shown through lexis’ such as ‘aiding’, ‘improving’, ‘positively’, ‘educational’  and ‘achievements’.

How does the author represent themselves?

·         The use of speech marks: ‘ “textisms” ‘

People normally relate ‘…ism’ when talking about prejudice or a negative issue like racism. However, by putting speech marks on ‘textisms’ shows that the writer doesn’t think text language is bad at all. Instead, the writer shows a rhetorical, sarcastic attitude towards ‘textisms’, suggesting that text language is favourable.

·       Writer does not use synthetic personalisation to have this fake, friendly relationship with the audience. Instead, the text is of high register, shown through formal, low frequency, polysyllabic words, such as ‘developmental’ and ‘cross-section’. This suggests the writer is intellectual and formal to the audience. Also, instead of using pronouns, he backs his ideas/opinions through overloading researches, nearly in every paragraph.

Effect of showing the writer is intellectual as well as having evidences successfully makes audience agree.

How does the author shape the readers’ response?

·       Use of the proper nouns of famous institution names such as, ‘Royal Holloway’ university and ‘Coventry University’ having done researches to back up the idea that texting is advantageous. This allows the audience to believe in it more.

·       ‘may actually’

The epistemic modal verb ‘may’ gives sense of possibility that texting really may be beneficial. It could also be a deontic modal verb, since the writer may be suggesting or giving the audience a permission to believe what he is saying. The adverb of degree ‘actually’ allows audience to realize that it doesn’t ‘actually’ ‘damage a child’s ability to use standard English’.

Also, the adverb of comment ‘surprisingly’ creates the same effect to audience that texting ‘surprisingly’ goes against to what many thought to be ‘damaging’ children’s language skills.

It gives a shocking impact to audience, successfully allowing them to believe it.

·       Use of the superlative ‘best’ and the comparative ‘better ’ creates a big impact. As a result, the writer successfully makes the audience having to think that text language isn’t a problem at all since children using text language are ‘better’ spellers and writers.

·       The structure of the text:

Almost all the paragraphs represent positive connotations and information’s towards text language, then in the end 2 paragraphs the writer quickly outlines negative connotations towards the issue. Writer is realistic. The effect of having ¾ of the text full of positive connotations and the remaining ¼ of negative connotations makes the text realistic since the text consists of both pros and cons, allowing audience to believe, agree and follow the writers’ opinion.

World English

KONGLISH is a combined form of Korean and English.

Phonological Variation

·  A typical phonological variation is speaking in more syllable-timed way, such as pronouncing ‘note’ as ‘noteu’.

·  In the Korean language, labio-dental and dental fricatives do not exist, therefore, in Konglish, speakers frequently replace fricatives with plosives, such as ‘dem’ instead of ‘them’.

Lexical Variation

·  Beoseu- Bus

·  Sentimiteo- Centimetre

·  Apateu- Apartment

·  Tim- Team

·  Naisseu-Nice

·  Bolpen- Ballpoint pen

·  Seuteureseu- Stress

·  Tibeu-i- TV

Grammatical Variation

·  Hardly any use of articles in Konglish due to articles not existing in the Korean language.

HINGLISH is a combined form of Hindi and English.

The words entered into Hinglish can take 2 forms; as an existing Indian language word being borrowed or as a translation of an Indian phrase or idea into English words.

Lexical Variation

·  airdash: going somewhere in a hurry

·  stadium: a bald man with a fringe of hair

·  pre-pone: the opposite of postpone, to bring something forward in time

·  co-brother: brother-in-law

·  glassy: wanting a drink

·  timepass: a distraction to pass the time

·  badmash: hooligan

Prescriptivism and Descriptivism

Prescriptivism

What?

Prescriptivism is the attitude or belief that one variety of a language is superior to others and should be promoted as such.

This creates a definite right and wrong in language usage. Hence, the language must be used in order to communicate properly.

An advantage of this is it allows all the speakers of that language to clearly communicate with each other. However, the language will no longer allow a development outside of the lexicon in the future, which may create educational and class issues based on those who know the rules and who don’t.

Examples of the rule: Don’t end a sentence with a preposition

                                       Don’t split infinitives

                                       Don’t use the passive voice

                                       Don’t use the pronoun ‘I’ in object position

Who?

• Lynne Truss- wrote a book called ‘Eats shoots and leaves'                                             

• Shadyah A. N. Cole- wrote an article on the historical development of prescriptivism, which shows how social and economic conditions influenced scholarly and popular attitudes to the English language; and Geoffrey Pullum’s ideology, power, and linguistic theory, in which the author assesses justifications for prescriptivist claims, and shows that 'in grammar the 19th century never really went away'.

• David Bentley Hart – wrote about English usage rules                                                       ‘The analytic, lexically antinomian line is that, in themselves, words mean nothing; persons use them as instruments to mean this or that. But, conversely, persons can mean only what they have the words to say, and so the finer our distinctions and more precise our definitions, the more we are able to mean.’

Descriptivism

What?

Descriptivism is a non-judgmental approach to language that focuses on how it is actually spoken and written; documenting and researching a language as it is spoken by native speakers with no judgments as to ‘correct’ forms.  It is the scientific study of language.

Who?

• Steven Pinker

• Henry Hitchings- wrote a book called ‘The English Wars’

• David Crystal – 'Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multi-directional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just change.'

Rastamouse Controversy

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/feb/15/rastamouse-cbeebies

Rastamouse: righteous rodent or rank stereotype?

Commentary 

The language issue in this text is represented positively. Throughout the text, we could say the semantic field is popularity; ‘energy’ ‘hero’ ‘fans’ ‘rising’ ‘most-watched’ ‘best’ ‘problem-solving’. All these word classes have optimistic connotations in which may allow the audience to have a positive approach towards ‘Rastamouse’.

The adverb of comment, ‘pleasingly retro feel’ pre-modifies the attributive adjective ‘retro’ for emphasis in which it will allow the audience to feel pleased and satisfied about the programme. The writer has cleverly used the adjective ‘retro’. Nowadays, through the media, retro is seemed to be the growing fashion/trend. Therefore, ‘retro’ catches the audience’s attention and creates the effect of persuading the audience to think that ‘Rastamouse’ is the new, cool trend and everyone should like it as it’s the ‘fashion’.

The proper nouns, ‘Paddington Bear’, ‘Dizzee Rascal’ and ‘Tinie Tempah’ are all famous and well-known names. The writer has created the effect of slowly allowing the audience to like ‘Rastamouse’ and making them assume that this programme is liked and preferred by everyone since the proper nouns mentioned are too.

The writer starts off the text with a triad rhetorical question, ‘righteous rodent or rank stereotype’. The controversy between the evaluative adjectives of ‘righteous’ and ‘rodent or rank’ suggests that as a result of ‘Rastamouse’ having many negative viewpoints from other sources such as The Telegraph and Mirror, the writer could not simply show his opinion straight away since it would not draw the audience’s attention. However, the purpose of writing ‘righteous’ first is that it could be argued to show the writers’ viewpoint; in which ‘Rastamouse’ programme is favoured by the writer. 

Almost ¾ of the text has confident representation about ‘Rastamouse’. There is only a short section on the negatives about the show. The writer has intelligently used statistics to make the audience follow the writers’ viewpoint. The use of factual statistics used, such as complaints from ‘6 viewers’ and ‘95’ complaining about the patois spoken actually encourages the audience to not feel discouraged about the show, but allows audience to not really care about the numbers. The reason being would be that beforehand, the writer has used the large number ‘9000’ fans, creating the effect of ignoring the negative statistics since the positive statistic of ‘9000’ is much larger than ‘6’ and ‘95’.

All of this allows the audience’s response to be in agreement with what the writer is saying.

BBC Voices

Aims

In 2004, BBC held a research to find out about people’s attitude towards different dialects and accents across the British Isles. 5000 people took part in the online survey.

Methodology

The online poll, hosted on the Greenfield website, was undertaken between 17th-26th November 2004, in which there were around 5010 respondents who completed the entire survey, and were all aged 15+. The sample nationally was a ratio of 49(male):51(female). It was middle-age spread; with 25-64s of whom were over-represented, along with the 15-24s and the 65+ who were under-represented. Social class data was not collected. There was a wide geographical spread. The sample was not specifically weighted to reflect UK gender, age, social class or geographical demographics, nor to ensure sample balance in any one local area or region. Out of the whole sample, 97% stated English as their first language and 26% stated that they spoke at least 1 language as well as English.

Cardiff University advised on the design of some questions in the poll.

Findings +Analysis

Celebrity Voices:

Across the U.K Sean Connery’s Scottish, Edinburgh accent was constantly voted the most pleasant. Newsreaders; Moira Stewart and Trevor Mcdonald were also very popular, with Trevor Mcdonald’s voice ranked 2nd in which was described to be ‘appealing’ and ‘authoritative’.

The respondents had a preference to accents that was relatively local to them, such as the Scotts say they loved Ewan McGregor's Perthshire accent, the English to Hugh Grant, Welsh to Richard Burton and the Northern Irish to Terry Wogan. On the other hand, those in Northern Ireland are the only group who found Ian Paisley’s voice acceptable. But, other areas in the U.K voted his as ‘least pleasant’. In Northern Ireland, Janet Street-Porter's Estuary tongue was declared least attractive, and she fared little better among Scottish and Welsh respondents.

What do you think of your voice?

59% wished they occasionally had a different accent. People suggested that it would be more pleasant to have another accent, claiming it would help others understand them better. The most wished for accent was the Standard English accent, however 7% say they would rather have a Southern Irish accent. Across U.K, people voted ‘an accent identical to your own’ as one of their favourite. 95% of the Northern Irish, 79% of the Welsh and 87% of the Scots say they have at least a moderately strong accent. However, 63% of the east and 64% of the south of England find their accent moderately strong. Generally, more people in the north-west of the U.K say they have an accent, than those in the south-east.

Attitudes towards accents

¾ of people in the U.K say they hear a lot of different accents in everyday life. In that, 78% enjoy hearing a variety of accents. Scottish, Edinburgh accent was thought to be pleasant and prestige. Whereas, accents such as Asian, Liverpool and Birmingham were deemed to be unpleasant and lacking in social status. There were 2 exceptions to the pattern; London accent is beneficial when applying for jobs, but people did not like to listen to it. However, Newcastle accent, people like listening to but was not a benefit when job hunting.

Conclusion + Evaluation

The study covers wide range of ideas and attitudes people have towards accents, and what accent is deemed to be the most popular and least popular. It suggests that Scottish and Standard English accents are valued most highly, in that it is pleasant and most beneficial when applying for jobs. In addition, people’s opinions on accents vary as it depends where an individual is living.

The study is thought to be reliable since it is held by one of the most leading organisations in the UK; BBC. In addition, it covered wide areas in the U.K with respondents being reasonably fair with the gender and possibly the age range. It would have been better if they picked more out of the 15-24s and the 65+. For example, the younger/teenage age (15-24) may have had a different opinion towards accents since that is the age where they don’t have a lot of experience in the world of work, and therefore they wouldn't know for sure that SE accent is the ‘best’ when job seeking, and are the age where they are most influenced by the media, etc.