Branches of Linguistics Sociolinguistics This branch of linguistics
Branches of Linguistics
Sociolinguistics This branch of linguistics concentrates on language in society. It tries to examine how and why people use language as they interact with other members of their society.
In considering any spoken communication, therefore, a student will notice that a speaker's language reveals information on his sex, approximate age, regional and perhaps ethnic origins, education and attitude to his listeners.
• Sociolinguists examine language use, its variation and development, change and standardization, its regional and class dialects.
What does sociolinguistics study? 1. Dialect: A dialect is a form of the language that is spoken in a particular part of the country or by a particular group of people. 2. A regional dialect is a distinct form of a language spoken in a particular geographical area.
3. A social dialect is a variety of language associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group. 4. A style is a set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Variation can occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically.
5. The term register refers to specific lexical and grammatical choices as made by speakers depending on the situational context, the participants of a conversation and the function of the language in the discourse
Pidgins and Creoles A pidgin evolves among adult native speakers of different languages. Lexicon usually comes from one language, structure often from the other.
A creole is a fully-functional language of its own which includes elements of its parent languages. A creole is a language that was originally a pidgin but has become nativized, i. e. a community of speakers claims it as their first language.
• A lingua franca, also known as a trade language or vehicular language, is a language or dialect systematically (as opposed to occasionally, or casually) used to make communication possible between people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both native languages.
Diglossia • A situation in which two languages (or two varieties of the same language) are used under different conditions within a community, often by the same speakers.
Bilingualism • Bilingualism is commonly defined as the use of at least two languages by an individual.
Psycholinguistics • This branch deals with the relationship between language and the mind, focusing mainly on how language is learnt, stored and occasionally lost.
• The relationship between language and mind has two aspects, acquisition and performance. • What we acquire is the ability to perform, that is, to use language with appropriateness, and performance is essential to complete and successful acquisition.
What does it study? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. How Children Learn Language The development of speech production The development of speech comprehension The relationship of speech production, speech comprehension, and thought Parentese and Baby Talk Imitation, rule learning, and correction Learning abstract words Memory and logic in language learning
Language disorders • Causes • Certain kinds of abnormal growth in the vocal organs, and damage to parts of the brain by accidents or illness producing aphasia are also handicaps clearly caused by a person's abnormal physical condition.
Aphasia 142 • Aphasia is defined as an impairment of language function due to localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding and/or producing linguistic forms. • Causes: • Brain cells die if deprived of oxygen for a few minutes. This can happen: a. if a person suffers from a stroke caused by fatty cholesterol deposits in the arteries associated with smoking, diet and lack of exercise; or caused by artery blockage by foreign matter in the brain area that deals with language.
b. if one of the language areas in the brain suffers from an injury caused by falls, accidents etc.
Types: (1) Broca's Aphasia • Damage to Broca's area usually results in a disorder with several symptoms: • characterized by a substantially reduced amount of speech, distorted articulation and slow, often effortful speech
• What is said often consists almost entirely of lexical morphemes (e. g. nouns, verbs). The frequent omission of functional morphemes (e. g. articles, prepositions) and inflections (e. g. plural -s, past tense -ed) has led to the characterization of this type of aphasic speech as ‘agrammatic’. In agrammatic speech, the grammatical markers are missing
Example • I eggs and eat and drink coffee breakfast.
Features a- The first feature is poor pronunciation. b- The second is systematic substitution and deletion of sounds;
• /sruw/ for/ skruw/: (screw). c. The third feature is impairment in the ability to form morphological and syntactic patterns, especially the loss of most grammatical vocabulary items such as prepositions, determiners and inflectional affixes.
d- This aphasia is also characterized by a certain deficiency' in syntactic knowledge. For instance, passive sentences are difficult for them to interpret.
(2) Wernicke's Aphasia. • The type of language disorder that results in difficulties in auditory comprehension is sometimes called ‘sensory aphasia’, but is more commonly known as Wernicke’s aphasia.
• Someone suffering from this disorder can actually produce very fluent speech which is, however, often difficult to make sense of.
• Difficulty in finding the correct word, sometimes referred to as anomia, also happens in Wernicke’s aphasia
Competence VS performance • Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which is the way a language system is used in communication.
Competence • Competence is a person’s underlying (subconscious) linguistic ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. • It’s a person's acquaintance with a set of grammatical rules and is different from the actual linguistic activities. • Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology.
Performance q. Performance is the real world linguistic output. q. May accurately reflect competence, but it also may include speech errors. q. Performance may be flawed because of memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) or other psychological factors. q. Represents only a small sample of possible utterances.
What is Stylistics? Stylistics is the science which explores how readers interact with the language of (mainly literary) texts in order to explain how we understand, and are affected by texts when we read them.
□ □ □ Stylistics is the scientific study of style, which can be viewed in several ways. More technically, stylistics is the study of the linguistic features of a literary text _ phonological, lexical, syntactical _which directly affects the meaning of an utterance. The variety in stylistics is due to the main influences of linguistics & literary
□ Therefore, stylistics is concerned with the examination of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological properties and discursive devices. It might seem that the same issues are investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case, however sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant on the social class, gender , age , etc , while stylistics is more interested in the significance of function that the style fulfills
Stylistics examines oral and written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic linguistic properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the texts. Thus, it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to discourse analysis, in particular critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics.
□ Nowadays, however, linguists study various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as well as novels and advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the text types is discriminated and thought to be more important than others.
Stylistics
What is Stylistics? Stylistics is the science which explores how readers interact with the language of (mainly literary) texts in order to explain how we understand, and are affected by texts when we read them.
□ □ □ Stylistics is the scientific study of style, which can be viewed in several ways. More technically, stylistics is the study of the linguistic features of a literary text _ phonological, lexical, syntactical _which directly affects the meaning of an utterance. The variety in stylistics is due to the main influences of linguistics & literary
□ Therefore, stylistics is concerned with the examination of grammar, lexis, semantics, as well as phonological properties and discursive devices. It might seem that the same issues are investigated by sociolinguistics, and indeed that is the case, however sociolinguistics analyses the above mentioned issues seen as dependant on the social class, gender , age , etc , while stylistics is more interested in the significance of function that the style fulfills
Stylistics examines oral and written texts in order to determine crucial characteristic linguistic properties, structures and patterns influencing perception of the texts. Thus, it can be said that this branch of linguistics is related to discourse analysis, in particular critical discourse analysis, and pragmatics.
□ Nowadays, however, linguists study various kinds of texts, such as manuals, recipes, as well as novels and advertisements. It is vital to add here that none of the text types is discriminated and thought to be more important than others.
Types of Stylistics • General Stylistics or Stylistics • This is stylistics viewed from the broad notion of the linguistic study of all types of linguistic events from different domains of life. It is used as a cover term for the analysis of nonliterary varieties of language, or registers
Literary Stylistics • This is the type of analysis that focuses on literary texts. In the broad sense, such a study may be linguistic or non-linguistic, but in the more specialized sense, it is essentially linguistic
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