Lexical and Grammatical Development of Children Summary

The Pre-Verbal Stage

• The cooing stage occurs when a child is roughly 8-20 weeks old where they produce sounds such as "aaaaah."
• The babbling stage occurs when a child reaches 9 months old and can produce sounds such as "ba, ba , bbb." 
• The next stage is known as verbal scribbling and happens when the child is 30 weeks old, this is where the child uses a range of consonants, vowels and fricative sounds which are produced when sounds escape through a small air passage in the mouth. 
• Melodic Utterance occurs when the child is roughly 9-18 months and the sounds they utter become more recognizable.  

Lexical and Grammatical Development 

Stage One- The Holophrastic Stage 

• Stage one is known as the holophrastic stage, this occurs when the child is roughly 12-18 months old. In this stage the child utters their first word and builds a vocabulary of holophrases also known as single words to convey meaning. At this age the child has learnt about 50 words and so from the pre-verbal stage has developed to understand 5 times more words. It is known as holophrase as oppose to words as they all convey the meaning of a phase or sentence through body language, intonation and volume related to the child everyday life e.g. "doggy" and "gaga". 

Stage Two- The Two Word Stage 

• Stage two is known as the two word stage, this is where children of aged 18 months begin to use two words at a time. Some call this stage the 'emergence of grammar' as it is now possible for a child to choose word order and make a simple grammatical analyses of the meanings of these sentences. They often consist of a noun and a verb the same as an objects and an action.                                           The type of utterances are more flexible with a range of grammatical functions e.g. 

1. An action affects an object- "Make bridge"
2. An order performs an action- "Mummy sleep"
3. An object is given a location 

• It is possible to work out grammar behind utterance and there are quite a few that defy definition and understanding including: "hot pretty", "mummy-daddy", "teddy-juice". These do not make sense but it is evident  that the child is asking for their teddy and some juice however they do not have the language skills to differentiate asking for this in two separate sentences. 
• The meaning relies heavily on context and a sympathetic listener 
• Correct syntax (Word Order)- "My Bed"
• Begin to use preposition- "On Head"
• Possession Words- "My Cat"
• Pronouns- "She Cold" = The child is able to refer to others as well as themselves

Stage Three- The Telegraphic Stage 

 

• At the age of 2-2 and a half years a child goes into the telegraphic stage, this is where the child begins to use sentences containing up to 4 words in length. Sentences with gaps where the non lexical words ( those without a dictionary meaning) such as "and", "but" and "if" (conjunctions) "the", "a" (articles) "is", "has" (auxilary verbs) as well as endings like "ing" are lost. E.g. go swim instead of go swimming. The child combines 3-4 words in a variety of constructions e.g. a statement sentence, a question sentence and a command sentece.
• After the age of 3 child langauge advances in leaps and bounds, although massive developments happen simultaneously and are linked together. The simpliest way is to divide them into four categories, these are:

1. Semantics
2. Phonology
3. Grammar
4. Pragmatics

Stage Four- Post Telegraphic Stage

 

• The post telegraphic stage begins at roughly 36 months in a childs life, this is where they start to become more grammatically complex and their development of reading and writing skills begin to improve. 

 

Investigating Language on Twitter

Introduction
Social Context= Power
Hypothesis= I predict that celebrity figures use power in language to portray a higher level of power compared to an average person, and attempt to build relationships between them and their audience.
This corresponds with the theory of Dan Clayton- Positioning and Stance.
In order to conduct this investigation various tweets were selected which were published by a celebrity and the average individual.

Methadology
I selected ten tweets using stratified sampling, five tweets from a celebrity and five tweets from an ordinary person.This involved taking every third tweet from the twitter accounts which avoided cherry picking and gave a wide variety of data. Furthermore my data had no obvious anomolies that would affect my results, and I did not know these people on a personal bias making the data reliable and unbias.
Benefits and limitations included the fact that these ten tweets were no where near representitive of the target population of twitter users and the tweets selected did not come from a very large pool. It may have been more reliable and respresentitive to take every 20th tweet from the users twitter. This also has further disadvantages as it is more time consuming to collect the data. Finally, I feel that ten tweets was no where near enuogh data to analyse accurately. As each tweet only has a maximum of 140 characters this made it difficult to analyse and annotate.

Analysis
So far in this mini investigation of language on twitter I have found that celebrity figures such as Katie Hopkins use more persnoal pronouns such as I, you, she, he etc. to adress their mass audience as indivuals. The use of synthetic personalisation 'you' helps Katie Hopkins to address her audience as individuals as it feels like they are the only ones she is speaking to. Furthermore, she is also found replying to her fans a lot which shows she does talk and adress her audience directly which is a positive but also demonstrates that maybe celebrities try not to be this authoritarian figure we impose them to be. Instead, they're more role models and celebrities like Katie Hopkins like to adress their mass audience individually by tweeting them. Katie Hopkins is a very opinionated individual which is good in her speech as she uses this to her advantage by influencing her opinion on others in her tweets. Lastly, Katie Hopkins also uses a number of empty adjectives by adressing her audience when replying to their tweets as 'lovely'. However, this language technique is more to do with the social context language and gender rather than language and power. On the other hand non celebrities tend to acquire more multimodality in their language to express emotion. For example, using sad faces to express the fact that they are poorly. Whereas Katie Hopkins tends to use connotations of emotion such as 'xxx' to represent kisses. However this again could in fact be an aspect of the social context language and gender.

Conclusion
I feel my hypothesis has been proved in one aspect and this is the fact that Katie Hopkins tends to use personal pronouns to address her mass audience as individuals and is talking to these people. On the other hand the non celebrity uses language in his tweets in general. He does not use any personal pronouns which shows he does not have anyone to direct his tweets to. Therefore this supports the theory of Dan Clayton and the fact that people in higher power attempt to build relationships with the writer. Whereas the non celebrity tends to use general language with no personal pronouns to show who in fact he is talking to. Due to the limit of characters istead of explain how he feels multimodality is used which implies he must not have much power. The male who is non celebrity uses multimodality in his tweets to express feeling however, the female who is a celebrity uses connotations of emotion such as 'xxx' to portray how she is feeling and furthermore she uses empty adjectives such as 'lovely'. This therefore makes me wonder whether I had chosen the wrong social context to study and my hypothesis should have been linked to language and gender, or whether I should have spent longer looking for my data and analysed more of it to come up with a better analysis filled with more language techniques and terminology.

2-3 Paragraphs of Analysis of the June 2013 Paper

Analysis on the June 2013 Paper

Study the texts A–G on the next seven pages.  These texts illustrate different varieties of language use.

Discuss various ways in which these texts can be grouped, giving linguistic reasons for your choices. (48 marks)

Texts A-G all illustrate different varieties of language use and can be grouped in various ways. One way some of these texts can be grouped is due to the graphology features used. Texts B, C, F and G can be grouped as all four of these texts are posters. Compared to all the other texts they immediately stand out, they are eye catching due to the big bold headings and subheadings although they lack a range of lexis. Texts C and F also contain images and colour making the texts much more appealing to their audience. For example the pragmatics in text C shows a chicken and a mushroom having a conversation. The chicken says “In a chicken and mushroom casserole, I’M THE MAN.” The mushroom replies “you are the chicken.” This shows a creation of a relationship with the intended audience of people who are looking into healthy eating. It includes humour into a healthy eating adverting portraying that healthy eating can be fun.

In addition the subject specific lexis stands out in texts D, F and G. For example in text D subject specific lexis is spoken between the two people having a conversation. They use the word ‘Morrissey’ to refer to a British singer and lyricist rather than his full name ‘Steven Morrissey.’ It may be only the adults talking during their night out that understand the meaning of Morrissey and other people not part of the group may not know what these people are talking about. Other subject specific lexis includes ‘fan’, ‘lyricist’ and other singer’s names to show the discourse of these peoples conversation. Similarly in text G where subject specific lexis is demonstrated in terms of technology for example the words ‘broadband’, ‘wireless’, ‘connection’ and ‘BT total broadband’. People who are not up to date with current technology may not understand the meaning of these words and therefore the lexis is specific to those who use technology and is aimed at a younger audience. Text F also demonstrates subject specific lexis through a poster about bike safety. For example words such as ‘bicycle’, ‘helmet’, ‘reflectors’ etc. show subject specific lexis, however most people are likely to understand these terms.

Language and Power Class Notes

Language and Power Class Notes

 -Conversations
-Political Speeches/ Debates
-Arguments
-Transcripts
-Letters
-Written Language i.e. eviction notices

 There are two types of power according to Wareing 1999 Political/Personal/Social group

1.       Instrumental Power
2.       Influential Power

Type of Power	Example:
Political	Held by politicians, the police and those working in law courts
Personal	Those who hold a position of power as a result of their occupation or role such as teachers or employers.
Social Group	Those who hold power as a result of social variables such as class, gender, age (typically) but not exclusively white, middle class men hold positions of power.

 

1.       Instrumental- When it is used by individuals or groups to maintain and enforce authority.
2.       Influential- When it is used to influence and persuade others:

·         Peer Pressure
·         Politics
·         Government
·         Media and Advertising

Task 1

 What does it mean to be powerful?

 

·         Being knowledgeable
·         Being respected
·         Be able to take control and have the last say
·         Leadership
·         Narccism (Love yourself)
·        Authority
·         Confidence
·         Responsibility
·         Encouraging
·         Assertive (In charge)
·         Intimidating
·         Being decisive
·         Being a role model
·         Experience

 What does not dictate power?

·         Age

·         Gender

·         Qualifications

 

What situation is an interview? How do you feel? What do you expect?

Interviewer- Instrumental

Interviewee - Influential

·         Interviewer uses interrogative questions

·         Put on the spot
·         We use declaratives e.g. ‘I will’
·         Try to project confidence in body language
·         Expect to use formal language and lexis
·         They have the power to give us the job: assertive, decisive, higher position of power
·         Use maxim of manner and maxim of relevance
·         Control the way we speak including tone/volume
·         Completely unfamiliar in terms of discourse

 

 

 

Shawshank Redemption Presentation

Shawshank Redemption
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtwXlIwozog

 Parole Officer

 •     He starts off with the power, however his turn is shorter than Red’s and hence his moment of power is shorter

•       The conversation begins on the parole officers terms as he sets the agenda and frames the conservation by calling him by his full name- ‘Ellis Boyd Reading’

•       He speaks clear and rhythmically using formal lexis

•       He used imperatives such as ‘please sit down’ which uses maxim of manner, displaying his confidence of his authority because formality is uncommon in a prison.

•       However he doesn’t have maxim of quantity, but instead wants Red to use it in his speech to see if he can be released from prison.

Red

•       Personal authority: knows that the parole officer and him are not part of the same group so does not use “we”, uses “I” instead

•       Rhetorical questions: “What do you really wanna know?”

•       His authority is visible because his speech sticks to the four Maxims – the reason why he sounds eloquent.

Brown + Levinson's Face Theory and Grice's Maxims

Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory

Politeness can be described as normal social behaviour or a set of prescriptive social ‘rules’ also known as rules or things we do to be liked. Lots of linguists have researched into politeness including Brown and Levinson who developed their face theory in 1987, based on our desire to be liked.

Brown and Levinson’s theory is called the ‘face theory’ this is because of our public image which is important during everyday interaction. There are two aspect of ‘face’, these are positive and negative. Positive is the desire to be appreciated and liked whereas the negative face is the desire to be free and therefore not be imposed upon. Brown and Levinson also come up with the face threatening act (FTA) this is where an act is put on purposely threatens the face needs of others.

Politeness is defined as ‘using communicative ways to create and maintain social harmony.’ Brown and Levinson’s face theory relates to this is various ways:

·         Being appropriate
·         Following social and cultural normality
·         Being socially positive

People use politeness strategies in order to ‘save face’ by using FTA’s:

·         Not attempting to minimise face threat
·         Positive politeness, showing you value someone
·         Negative politeness, not impending on someone
·         Avoiding responsibility for the FTA by being indirect

Politeness strategies are also determined by contextual factors:

·         Power of relationship between listener and speaker
·         Social distance between listener and speaker
·         How great the threat of the FTA is

The aim of conversation is usually cooperative, therefore the more dangerous our FTA is, the higher number strategy we use.

 

 

Grice’s Maxim’s

Maxim of Quantity- A person attempts to be as informative as they can and gives as much information as needed and no more.

Maxim of Quality- A person attempts to be truthful and therefore doesn’t pass on false information or say anything that cannot be supported by evidence.

Maxim of Relevance- A person tries to be relevant and only says things relevant to the topic of conversation.

Maxim of Manor- A person attempts to be as clear, as brief and as orderly as they can avoiding obscurity and ambiguity.