miércoles, 9 de octubre de 2013

SOCIOLINGUISTICS


The relationship between language and society is strongly linked because the language has several functions in society and society the same way language is used for specific functions.
Language is the primary tool for communication, for the establishment of peace and order in our society, to show authority and power, and the achievement of goals and objectives. 
The company controls our language yet giving preferences for what they are acceptable and not, as each one of us has his own perception or point of view. A group of people can accept our language, but for others it may be a kind of offense or insult.


In linguistics, an accent depends mostly on pronunciation of specific words or phrases. An accent is the manner in which different people pronounce words differently from each other. Accents differ depending on a particular individual, location, or nation. The accent can also help identify the locality, region, the socio-economic statues, the ethnicity, caste and/or social class of the speaker. All these factors affect the accent of a person. Diversity also plays a huge part in shaping different accents. Accents usually differ in the quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. For example, the word ‘route’ is pronounced as ‘roote’ in the US, while as ‘raut’ in the UK.
Dialect = a form of a language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group { from the Greek dialektos "discourse, way of speaking"}

Accent = a way of pronouncing a language, associated with a country, area, or social class, an emphasis given to a syllable, word, or note.{from the Latin accentus "tone, signal, or intensity"


Accent

An accent refers to a phonetic trait from a person's original language (L1) that is carried over a second language (L2).

Dialect

A dialect refers to sets of differences, wherever they may occur, that make one English speaker's speech different from one another's. 

Communication Difference

A communication difference is a variation of a symbol system used by a group of individuals that reflects and is determined by shared regional, social, or cultural/ethnic factors. A regional, social, or cultural/ethnic variation of a symbol system should not be considered a disorder of speech or language. Most often we think of those who speak with an accent or dialect. 

  • COVER PRESTIGE: In sociolinguisticsprestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society. Generally, there is positive prestige associated with the language or dialect of the upper classes, and negative prestige with the language or dialect of the lower classes
  • OVER PRESTIGE: Speakers of non-standard varieties who adopt [to some degree] the standard variety. 
    Speaker is seeking to associate self with general prestigious dialect within a society
  • PIDGIN LANGUAGE: A simplified form of speech that is usually a mixture of two or more languages, has a rudimentary grammar and vocabulary, is used for communication between groups speaking different languages, and is not spoken as a first or native language. Also called contact language.                                                                                                                                            Linguistics) a language made up of elements of two or more other languages and used for contacts, esp trading contacts, between the speakers of other languages. Unlike creoles, pidgins do not constitute the mother tongue of any speech community.
  • CREOLE LANGUAGE:vernacular languages that developed in colonial European plantation settlements in the 17th and 18th centuries as a result of contact between groups that spoke mutually unintelligible languages. Creole languages most often emerged in colonies located near the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean or the Indian Ocean. Exceptions include Brazil, where no creole emerged, and Cape Verde and the Lesser Antilles, where creoles developed in slave depots rather than on plantations.

martes, 8 de octubre de 2013

SINTAX

SINTAX



Syntax: Is basically the structure of sentences. Sentences have to follow certain structural rules in order to make sense. You can’t just throw any words together to make a sentence! 

Grammar: is the system of a language. People sometimes describe grammar as the "rules" of a language; but in fact no language has rules. 

Parse tree: A concrete syntax tree or parse tree is an (ordered, rooted) tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some formal grammar. In a parse tree, the interior nodes are labeled by non-terminals of the grammar, while the leaf nodes are labeled by terminals of the grammar. 

Noun phrase: a word or group of words that functions in a sentence as subject, object, or prepositional object. 

Verb phrase: a verb phrase is a syntactic unit that corresponds to the predicate. In addition to the verb, this includes auxiliaries, objects, object complements, and other constituents apart from the subject. 

Sentences: In simple terms, a sentence is a set of words that contain:

a subject (what the sentence is about, the topic of the sentence)
a predicate (what is said about the subject) (http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/what-is-a-sentence.htm)

Determiners: are words like the, an, my, some. They are grammatically similar. They all come at the beginning of noun phrases, and usually we cannot use more than one determiner in the same noun phrase. 

Adjective: An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by describing, identifying, or quantifying words. An adjective usually precedes the noun or the pronoun which it modifies. )

Adverb: An adverb is a word that tells us more about a verb. It "qualifies" or "modifies" a verb (The man ran quickly). 

Noun: A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea. Nouns are usually the first words which small children learn. 

Pronoun: A pronoun can replace a noun or another pronoun. You use pronouns like "he," "which," "none," and "you" to make your sentences less cumbersome and less repetitive. 

Prepositional phrase: A prepositional phrase is a group of words that begins with a preposition and ends with a noun or a pronoun. This noun or pronoun is called the “object of the preposition.” 

Auxiliary verb: The most common auxiliary verbs are "be," "do," and "have", and you may also use these verbs on their own. You use "Will" and "shall" to express future time. (http://www.writingcentre.uottawa.ca/hypergrammar/auxvb.html)

Verb: The verb is perhaps the most important part of the sentence. A verb or compound verb asserts something about the subject of the sentence and express actions, events, or states of being. 

(http://www.writingcentre.uottawa.ca/hypergrammar/pronouns.html)