Grammar Review: Quia Page
practice |more |still_more | last_chance | key_terms
Talkin’ About Talk: Can you make a living loving language? Chapter 42 (p.183) and
Why do American Southerners Talk that Way? Chapter 26 (p. 116)
Grammar Review
Dialects Do you have an idiolect?
- Dialect leveling; how has your own dialect changed as a result of moving to the DC area?
Regional Dialects
- caused by communication barriers
Accents
- Refers to non-natives’ speech patterns
Dialects of English
- Types of Differences
- Phonological
- Lexical
- Dialect atlases reflect regional lexical differences
- Syntactic – between you and I / between you and me What would you call these dialects? Wrong & Right?
Standard Dialect
Language Purists
- SAE – idealization
- Language purism crises go back to Greek gramamarians
- Banned Languages
- Cajun English/French
- Native American Languages
- French Academy
- Sign language
- US English imperialism movement
- Language Revival
Latino English
- Code-switching
- Chicano English characteristics
- homonyms caused by fewer vowel sound distinctions
- ch and sh sounds alternated
- devoicing of some consonants
- initial consonant substitution /th/ and /d/
- consonant cluster simplification (word final)
- prosodic differences
- sequential constraint – word cannot begin with /s/
- Other varieties: Cuban, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan, El Salvadoran
Pidgins & Creoles What’s the difference between a pidgin & a creole & a
lingua Franca? (let’s do a matching!)
| 1. Language used by common agreement | a. ______________________________________ |
| 2. rudimentary language formed from two (or more) languages in contact(with limited lexical items and les comlex grammatical rules) | b. ______________________________________ |
| 3. former pidgin language adopted by community and learned bychildren as a first language | c. ______________________________________ |
Language, Sex & Gender
Robin Lakoff wrote Language & Woman’s Place in the early 70s. A revised edition of the book has been published
Her other work includes Talking Power (1992) and The Language War (2000)
Nancy Pelosi / Hillary Clinton: Woman or Female?
Sex on the Brain (Commentary on “The Female Brain” and the male/female word debate)
Marked & Unmarked terms
Can you identify a change in the language within your lifetime to reflect awareness of gender-marked forms?
(hint: ladies/women)
Activity: How would you make a change to gender-determined language?
Godself: gender-neutral pronoun for God
Name for men equivalent to ‘slut’ for women
Way to refer to the female president’s husband: Mr. President or First Gentleman?