TED talks- texting is killing language

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk

This link shows John Mcwhorter talking about whether or not texting is killing language. He states that there is more to texting lingusticaly, cultrually than it seems. He also said that linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. John stated that it is usually more noticeable if people are in a group talking. It could be said that speech today that people use is much more telegraphic.

Analysis with an old fashion magazine in 1915 with one from 2011 and the language change

From analysing both fashion magazines, it’s clear that over time language hasn't changed massively. The first magazine from 1915 showed a lot of lexis and features that we still use today, examples that i analysed was that: the article used old fashion terms such as 'bookmaker' and this also showed that they could use two words and put them together to create compounds. The article also showed examples of proper nouns such as 'Tennis courts' and 'Golf shoe', adjectives were also used to help make the article more interesting examples were 'flamboyant', 'scuffling' and 'excellency' which also helps adds more description to the piece of clothing they are talking about. They also use first person pronouns such as 'i' showing they have their own personal view on what they are describing, and also synthetic personalisation helping to involve the consumers who are reading about the products. 

In the second magazine article from 2011 it follows on with the same language features used, such as proper nouns such as ' craftsmanship' and 'Ferrari' trying to show their wide knowledge in the area. They also use synthetic personalisation such as 'you' which is also there to help direct it to the audience, making them feel involved. Language features that weren’t used in the 1915 article were the use of alliteration such as 'Fashion forward'. Similes were used examples from the text were; ' ribbed like the seats of a Ferrari' which instantly makes the article more interesting. Facts and figures were also included to help back up the products they were talking about, to help persuade the audience more, and to help them understand more about the product. 

Overall the two articles show many similarities, with the use of language features from 1915 to 2011 the language used hasn’t changed massively the features are still used today a lot, the only thing that has been included is the use of more descriptive language use, to make them more appealing to the audiences.

Have we literally broken the English language?- The guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/literally-broken-english-language-definition
Mucking about with its meaning isn't clever or inventive any more

"Literally" has been playfully abused since the time of Walter Scott. In Chronicles of the Canongate, for example, he writes: "The house was literally electrified; and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius that he could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence could be carried." This was 1827, before the popularisation of the electric light: the house was figuratively electrified.
In 1837, a piece in The Mother's Magazine by Abigail and Samuel Whittelsey contained the phrase, "They both literally slept in Jesus", and in 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, that Sherlock's room "was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams" (we can probably also take this as figurative).
The point is that even if it was fun and surprising to force a "literally" where another word should go back in the 1800s, it's getting a bit old now. But not quite old enough to change the word's meaning completely and clean it of all the irritatingly playful associations.
Plus, since then the word has picked up way too much baggage to make it usefully nifty. "Literally" has been mainstream shorthand for "talking like a teenage girl" for a decade – you're not going to get rid of that reference without violent verbal acrobatics. Literally, I'm afraid, is, like, totally eighteen-hundred and late.

To use it is to teeter on the edge of a conversational wormhole

You might be near a pedant, and they will say something like "Don't you mean 'figuratively?'" (no, no one says "figuratively" – it is pretentious) or go into "Yes, your foot is LITERALLY coming off. I LITERALLY believe you" paroxysms until smothered. These are the same people who use the word as a definitive intelligence measure – see the snobbery over Jamie Redknapp last year – which in my mind is as much of an error as using a specific piece of knowledge as a mark of cleverness ("X% of Americans don't know where Armenia is! So stupid…").

There isn't much to be done

Given all of this, even when someone does use the word correctly, ("he's literally the prime minister"), it is often such a surprise to the listener that the conversation halts anyway – prompting something like "er, yes. You're right. He literally is" to emphasise just how much they have acknowledged your traditional use of language.
So there really is not much we can do with the word "literally", other than avoid it completely. At the moment it is irredeemable. It is a moot word. We just have to leave it up in its bedroom for a while until it grows up a bit.

8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today- The guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language

Words that used to begin with "n"

Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.

When sounds swap around

Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.

When sounds disappear

English spelling can be a pain, but it's also a repository of information about the history of pronunciation. Are we being lazy when we say the name of the third day of the working week? Our ancestors might have thought so. Given that it was once "Woden's day" (named after the Norse god), the "d" isn't just for decoration, and was pronounced up until relatively recently. Who now says the "t" in Christmas? It must have been there at one point, as the messiah wasn't actually called Chris. These are examples of syncope.

When sounds intrude

Our anatomy can make some changes more likely than others. The simple mechanics of moving from a nasal sound ("m" or "n") to a non-nasal one can make a consonant pop up in-between. Thunder used to be "thuner", and empty "emty". You can see the same process happening now with words like hamster, which often gets pronounced with an intruding "p". This is a type of epenthesis.

When "l" goes dark

A dark "l", in linguistic jargon, is one pronounced with the back of the tongue raised. In English, it is found after vowels, as in the words full or pole. This tongue raising can go so far that the "l" ends up sounding like a "w". People frown on this in non-standard dialects such as cockney ("the ol' bill"). But the "l" in folk, talk and walk used to be pronounced. Now almost everyone uses a "w" instead- we effectively say fowk, tawk and wawk. This process is called velarisation.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Your grandmother might not like the way you pronounce tune. She might place a delicate "y" sound before the vowel, saying tyune where you would say chune. The same goes for other words like tutor or duke. But this process, called affrication, is happening, like it or not. Within a single generation it has pretty much become standard English.

What the folk?

Borrowing from other languages can give rise to an entirely understandable and utterly charming kind of mistake. With little or no knowledge of the foreign tongue, we go for an approximation that makes some kind of sense in terms of both sound and meaning. This is folk etymology. Examples include crayfish, from the French écrevisse (not a fish but a kind of lobster); sparrow grass as a variant for asparagus in some English dialects; muskrat (conveniently musky, and a rodent, but named because of the Algonquin word muscascus meaning red); and female, which isn't a derivative of male at all, but comes from old French femelle meaning woman.

Spelling it like it is

As we've mentioned, English spelling can be a pain. That is mainly because our language underwent some seismic sound changes after the written forms of many words had been more or less settled. But just to confuse matters, spelling can reassert itself, with speakers taking their cue from the arrangement of letters on the page rather than what they hear. This is called spelling pronunciation. In Norwegian, "sk" is pronounced "sh". So early English-speaking adopters of skiing actually went shiing. Once the rest of us started reading about it in magazines we just said it how it looked. Influenced by spelling, some Americans are apparently starting to pronounce the "l" in words like balm and psalm (something which actually reflects a much earlier pronunciation).
My head is spinning now, so it's over to you. Which words do you mispronounce, and which common mispronunciations do you think we should resign ourselves to? And please share your most toe-curling linguistic gaffes below.

Language change- David Crystal on texting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h79V_qUp91M

David Crystal is suggesting that texting is good for the english language. Children who are texting fill them with abrevitaions, and the messages have invented their own abreviations. Everyone person who sends a text has a point, on average there are around only 10% of thr words used that are abreviated. It is known that 80% of adults text, adults and kids only started texting in 2000, 2001.

Language Change- David crystal The effect of new technologies on english

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVqcoB798Is

In the video clip is it David Crystal, talking about how new technologies have an effect on English today. There are new varieties of English, such as newspapers, then the development of the telephone people thought that the telephone was going to the a disaster as they didn't think people were going to communicate face to face anymore. Broadcasting has introduced a new variety of language such as commentaries in sport, and news reading, weather, and chat shows. The Internet is also having a big influence on the language people use today. Social networking plays a huge part in today's language an example is Twitter, it first started in 2006 David talks about how the social networking site, showed a prompt for users to use saying 'what are you doing' its is very introvert, people using the site started using many first person pronouns, present tenses. Then in 2009 twitter then changed his prompt to 'what' happening?' there is a sudden change in pronouns, there is a third person pronoun being used. He suggests that it would take a long time before the different types of technologies would influence people's language. David believes that English language is still the same as it used to be, there are only new abbreviations that have come into peoples language such as 'lol' but this hasn't had a huge impact on peoples language. The average number of people that use abreviations is only 10% not having a huge impact on peoples lexical choice,  and the other 90% of the language we use is standard english.

Barclays advert language

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcWsQdR0FKs

CLA skills table

Term	Explanation	Examples
Deletion	Omitting the final consonant in words	Do (g)
Substitution	Substituting one sound for another	‘pip’ for ‘ship’
Addition	Adding an extra vowel sound to the ends of words, creating a CVCV pattern	E.g. doggie
Assimilation	Changing one consonant or vowel for another	‘gog’ for ‘dog’
Reduplication	Repeating a whole syllable	Dada, mama
Consonant cluster reduction	Consonant clusters can be difficult to articulate, so children reduce them to smaller units	‘pider’ for ‘spider’
Deletion of unstressed syllables	Omitting the opening syllable in polysyllabic words	‘nana for banana’

Rate of lexical development

Age	Number of words
12 months	50
24 months	200
36 months	2,000

Types of overextension

Type	Definition	Example	% of overextension
Categorical overextension	The name for one member of a category is extended to all members of the category.	Apple used for all round fruits.	60%
Analogical overextension	A word for one object is extended to one in a different category; usually on the basis that it has some physical or functional connection.	Ball used for a round fruit	15%
Mismatch statements	One word sentences that appear quite abstract; child makes a statement about one object in relation to another.	Saying ‘duck’ when looking at an empty pond.	25%

Atchison’s stages of children’s linguistic development

Number	Stage	Description
1	Labelling	Linking words to the objects to which they refer understanding that things can be labelled.
2	Packaging	Exploring the labels and to what they can apply over/under extension occurs in order to eventually understand the range of words meaning.
3	Net-work building	Making connections between words, understanding similarities and opposites in meaning.

 Piaget’s stages of children’s linguistic development

Stage	Age	Key elements
Sensorimotor	Up to 2 years	The child experiences the physical world through the senses and begins classifying the things in it; lexical choices, when they appear, tend to concentrate rather than abstract.
Pre- operational	2-7	Language motor skills develop and become more competent. Language is egocentric- either focused on the child or used by the child when no one else is around.
Concrete operational	7-11	Children begin thinking logically about concrete events.
Formal operational	11+	Abstract reasoning skills develop.

Stages of children’s grammatical development

Stage	Descriptions	Grammatical constructions	Age (months)
One word/ holophrastic	One- word utterance		12-18
Two- word	Two words combined to create simple syntactical structures.	Subject verb Verb+ object	18-24
Telegraphic	Three or more words joined in increasingly complex and accurate orders	Subject+verb+object Subject+verb+complement Subject+verb+adverbial	24-36
Post- telegraphic	Increasing awareness of grammatical rules and irregularities.	Instead of saying ‘runned’ using ‘ran’	36+

A02- Stages and theory

• Parents converge towards their language, they talk to the child.
• face to face communication/ sense of sight rather than listening
• 18 month they know 50 lexical words, mostly nouns and politeness strategies.
• 18 month old, repeats sames word (phonological)
• nursery nurse and careers uses elongated words
• different intinations
• ontompapheia/ sounding words out
• 2 and a half start of a conversation adjacency pairs
• simples syntax
• career setting the agenda
• nursery rhymes/ children's books
• 3 years old know possessive pro-nouns
• 3/4 years old getting use to tense
• compound syntax (two main clauses to join sentences)
• At the age of 5 the children are more aware of external influences
• 'i was pushed' passive
• 6 year old- grices (sight sequence) used hand jesters

Features of spoken language

• Grices maxim
• quantity- where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
• quality- where someone tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
• relation- where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
• manner - avoid obscurity of oppression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, and be orderly.

• Halliday functions of speech
• instrumental- When the Person already has power over usually due to authority or law, example would be a teacher in a classroom.
• regulatory- where language is used to tell others what to do.
• interactional- Language used to develop social relationships and ease the process of interaction. Concerned with the phatic dimension of talk.
• personal-  Language used to express the personal preferences and identity of the speaker.
• heuristic-  Language used to learn and explore the environment.
• imaginative- Language used to explore the imagination
• representational-  Language used to exchange information

Stephen Fry- CLA notes

• Kids speak from the age of 2
• same in all languages 
• Victor was a child who took part in the forbidden experiment 
• vocal cords needed to work 
• struggled with language 
• Steven Pinker ( mentioned with CLA)
• context is significant 
• Children associate context with things they need 
• kids play with language ( from story books) 
• Rhyming couplets, poetry, sounds 
• WUG test- Berko Gleson 1958 
• WUG test supports Chomskys LAD theory 
• observers paradox 
• added 's' to pluralise 
• added 'ed' to make it pass tense 
• using grammatical rules to pluralise and simplify it
• the amount of language that parents apply for there children is crucial
• actively coaching them it doesn't always work, better learnt in a Natural process
• children use repetition to signify meaning 
• language defines our identity 
• Phonology 

AQA exam past paper transcript january 2013 CLA

Text A

Lou: shall we take your jacket off
Ruby: it's not a jacket it's a coat
Lou: oh (.) sorry (.) shall we take your COAT off then
Ruby: mmm
Lou: are you going to be a bossy boots all morning
Ruby: [nods & laughs] (3.0) what's up wiv Felma
Lou: Thelma [questioning intonation] (1.0) oh (.) she's been a silly girl (1.0) she's been
fighting
Ruby: what did it (.) what what was it (.) em Simba bitted by a dog
Lou: Simba got bitten by a do::g [questioning intonation] oh no is he all right
Ruby: yeh
Lou: yes
Ruby: he's better now
Lou: is he better now (.) the vet looked after him [questioning intonation] (2.0)
Ruby: no we took him to the bets two times but he's better
Lou: he's better [questioning intonation] oh that's good (.) Thelma's getting better
Ruby: Sim (.) Simba
slept on my (2.0) Fergal and Simba slept on my bed
Lou: oh (.) last night [questioning intonation]
Ruby: yeh
Lou: is there room on your bed for two pussy cats and you
Ruby: yes
Lou: is there (.) do they not get (.) do you not get pushed out of bed every night by two big
pussy cats
Ruby: no
Lou: they're almost as big as you your cats (1.0) shall we have some jam on toast
Ruby: yes
Lou: would you like some apple juice as well
Ruby: yes
Lou: what would you like first
Ruby: apple juice
Lou: apple juice (.) a little glass [questioning intonation]
Ruby: yes
Lou: yes (1.0)
Ruby: big girls have glass don't they
Lou: yes (.) big girls have glasses (.) it's all I've got (.) glasses (2.0)
Ruby: grandma has glass and cups
Lou: grandma has glass and cups does she (.) and what do you have at grandma's (1.0)
Ruby: apple juice and orange
Lou: apple juice and orange (.) there we go (.) where are you going to sit to have this (.)
do you want to sit at the table
Ruby: I'll sit (.) I want to sit in the room
Lou: oo:: no (.) not with your apple juice
Ruby: only wiz my toast (2.0)
Lou: sit here and I'll move my things out of the way
Ruby: only in (.) only wiz my toast
Lou: okay (.) there you go (1.0) can you manage
Ruby: Mummy got (3.0) Mummy's moved a bed
Lou: Mummy's moved her bed or your bed [questioning intonation] (2.0)
Ruby: her bed (.)
Lou: right (.) where's she moved it to
Ruby: (3.0) that (.) bit [pointing left]
Lou: that bit [laughs]
Ruby: then the baby's mattress is (.) on that bit [pointing right]
Lou: a::h I see:: (1.0) so Mummy's moved her bed so she can fit the bed in for the baby (.)
you excited about the baby [questioning intonation]
Ruby: (2.0) it's coming after Christmas
Lou: after Christmas (.) is Father Christmas going to bring it
Ruby: no (.) Mummy's made it
Lou: [laughs] Mummy's made it has she (.) she's clever your Mummy isn't she
Ruby: we don't know how she made it cos the books shows us (.) how's it (.) she made it
Lou: oh right (.) has she read the book with you (1.0) or are you getting a book
Ruby: (2.0) we haven't got a book about the baby we getting a book
Lou: are you looking forward to the baby (.) do you want a baby brother or a baby sister
Ruby: (3.0) I want a girl
Lou: a girl (2.0)
Ruby: I want to call it Dora
Lou: [laughs] Dora (.) after Dora the Explorer
Ruby: and when she gets bigger (.) she (.) she can explorer [laughs]
Lou: [laughs] when she gets bigger she can be an explorer
Ruby: no (.) Mum said when we at Sun (.) Sunday dinner (.) she'll be adorable [laughs]