Nine Ideas About Language Clark 5

1. Children learn their L1 swiftly, efficiently, and largely w/o instruction  Prewiring?  Children are not ‘taught’ to talk  Discover underlying rules  Not imitation, but hypothesizing  By school age, have already learned majority of NL governing rules

2. Language operates by rules  Arbitrary - sounds, grammar  Agreement among speakers to use features/patterns consistently  Variations are still governed by rules, and are mutually intelligible

3. All languages have 3 major components  Phonology  Lexicon  2 definitions of grammar

4. Everyone speaks a dialect  Dialect - variety of a particular language which has a set of distinguishing lexical, phonological, and grammatical rules  How do dialects occur?  No dialect is inherently superior

5. Speakers of all languages employ a range of styles and a set of sub-dialects or jargons  Ability to adjust language forms to social context - part of native understanding  Sociolinguistic rules  Learned late  Jargons  Martin Joos - 5 basic styles  Halliday - 7 main functions

6. Language change is normal  Sounds/grammar change more slowly than lexical changes  Causes –Simplification –Regularization –New ideas/inventions –Unknown/spontaneous

7. Languages are intimately related to the societies and individuals who use them  L is shaped by its speakers and their needs  Conversely, speakers are shaped by their language  Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

8. Value judgments about different languages or dialects are matters of taste  Every language is a ‘fully formed, logical, rule-governed variant of human speech’  Prestige for the standard is the result of prestige for its speakers/ prejudices of the dominate speech community  No intrinsic shortcomings of nonstandard forms

9. Writing is derivative of speech  Talking for half a million years, writing less than 5,000 years  Only 5% of languages have indigenous writing systems  Shifts in formality occur in writing, changes in speech habits are reflected in writing  Beliefs about writing are bound to literary tradition

JOURNAL TOPIC ONE:  Did you bring any misconceptions/ generalizations/ prejudices about language into this class? Is there anything new you have learned in regards to language?  One page, double-spaced, typed response for Wednesday, September 1st