Language and Society communicative competence and five questions of language change

First and foremost as a reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, so competence-performance distinction, no study of performance, intuition. BUT early friendly attempts with variable rules.

Reaction to traditional dialectology? Rejection of restricted speaker sample, data collection and atheoretical stance. BUT recognition of debt for the large databases. 

And discovery of poverty and disadvantage as political issues in US and Europe ->solve those related to language.

Labov: Failure of black children in schools. Studies structure of AAVE, in order to show that it had its own structure. 

Hymes: Work on cross-cultural communication. Function and form of language = culture specific. Miscommunication when they don't overlap. To raise awareness and prevent misunderstanding and disharmony.

Fishman: Work on multilingualism: Raise awareness, show it is an asset (not problem), support minority speakers and develop strategies to save dying languages.

multilingualism, language policy/planning, language death, language contact...
 

In between macro and micro: language variation and change

interactional sociolinguistics, sociopragmatics, conversational analysis, ethnography of communication.

In between macro and micro: language variation and change.

Linguistic: language variation and change

Social: conversation analysis/ethnomethodology

Both linguistic and social: ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis, sociology of language

Language can build on social context (discourse analysis). E.g.: "I got it from the one near boots"

Language reflects social context (most sociolinguistics): Our language reflects our awareness of different contexts and settings and relationships we find ourselves in and the identities we manifest if our life.

Language shapes social context (critical discourse analysis): One utterance shapes what follows. Language can be used to influence. "The police brutally attacked protesters..." VS. "Anarchists cause trouble..."

Interdisciplinarity, parallel universes in the research, across all departments, physical separation, structures don't encourage interdisciplinarity, responsibility in the departments to do the work assigned. 

Competence:
Allows speaker to recognise if a sentence is part of the language and to make an infinite number of novel sentences.

Performance:
Actual linguistic behaviour, incl. strange and 'faulty' utterances. (According to Chomsky it is fairly degenerate in quality and not worth studying)

She/he would be institutionalised :P

1. Linguistic competence
2. Sociovarietal competence
3. Pragmatic competence
4. Discourse competence
5. Strategic competence

• semantic competence
  • referential (denotative)
  • Connotative (emotional, associations)
  • Semantic structure: How a language divides up meanings in the world (English bro/sis vs. Maori tuakana/teina (older & younger sibling)
• Grammar: syntax, morphology, phonology, etc.

Setting and scene (time&place and cultural definition of occasion)

Participants (speaker/listener/addressee...)

Ends (marriage, catching up, social wellbeing)

Act sequence (structure, sometimes formal)

Key (tone manner and spirit)

Instrumentalities (channel and code)

Norms of interaction and interpretation (culturally specific behaviours in speaking)

Genre (particular types of speech (poem, lecture...)

Interpreting utternaces in context when form does not equal function

e.g. "Are these your dirty socks?" (put them away ASAP!); "Brrrrhhhhh." (You should totes give me your jacket to wear)

Grammar beyond the sentence. e.g. Turn-taking, closures, changin topic, signalling coherence in discourse.

Being competently incompetent. 

• paraphrasing stuff you don't know
• politeness and reacting to status
• knowledge of fillers: err, ummm, y'know, thingameebob, dooda, etc.

1. constraints problem
2. transitions problem
3. Embedding problem
4. Evaluation problem
5. actuation problem

Well it deals with how language can even change in the first place. Not all changes are likely to happen, some are constrained. 

Languages tend to loose unmarked traits in favour of marked ones.

• e.g. deletion of /h/
• fronting of /θ/ and /ð/
• Harris on what you can do to a /t/: lenition versus fortition

Well then how did languages become marked in the first place?

Investigates how linguistic features move from one form to another. Gradually or abruptly?

Two approaches

1. Neogrammarian sound change
2. Lexical diffusion

1. They are phonetically gradual
   • They basically go through incremental stages, that's all
2. they affect all words at the same time (not necessarily at the same speed though)
   • All words with a changing vowel will be affected.
3. they are only (!) shaped during the progress of the change by phonological factors
   • Phonemes before and after the sound affect the change
     • e.g. The fronting of /uː/ to [ʉː] (words like ‘goose’, ‘room’, ‘tube’, ‘hoof’, ‘shoot’, ‘zoom’)
     • and the fronting of /ʊ/ to [ɨ] (words like ‘foot’, ‘wool’, ‘good’, ‘book’, ‘look’, ‘push’, ‘full’, ‘pull’, ‘shook’,  ‘took’, ‘sugar’,  ‘woman’)
       • is more advanced before alveolar consonants (such as /s t d/) than before others (such as /m f k g).

Analogy: changes that follow well-established common patterns (sorta making language more regular): - plural of 'cow' change from 'kine' to 'cows' in early modern Engl. 

Taboo: Avoid taboo by changing stuff: God > gosh (*cod-cosh, *nod-nosh); Damn > darn (*ham-harn, *ram-rarn)

Borrowings and contacts: Sounds that are imported from borrowed words don't count as evidence against the theory.

They jump from original pronunciation to new, without phonetically intermediate stages and all that jazz. (Chinese linguistics in the 60's)

Metathesis (sounds switched around)

• e.g. bryde [bridɛ] > bird [bird > bɜrd > bɜːd]
  e.g. frist > first
  e.g. thridde > third

Epenthesis (sounds are added)

• e.g. Latin ‘spata’ (sword) > Spanish ‘espada’, French ‘épée’;
• e.g. NZE epenthetic schwa in –own past participles (e.g grown, 
mown [grʌʊən];
• e.g. Old English ‘thunrian’ > thundrian > thunder;

Changes in place of articulation:

• /t/: [t] > [ʔ]: butter: [bʌtə] – [bʌʔə]

• Phonetically abrubt
• affects different words at different times
• does not change in a phonetically predictable or tidy order
  • no rule that can accurately predict the change alone.
• often never reaches completion
  • we have a bunch of words with older and some with newer pronunciation

Words like ‘bath’, ‘trap’, ‘after’, ‘band’, ‘dance’, etc, all used to be pronounced with /a/:[a]. A change began (17 th century) in some places, leading some of the words containing /a/ to lengthen [aː], and in some places move back [ɑː]. 
- The change was phonetically abrupt – the vowel didn’t gradually lengthen, it did so abruptly;
- Some words lengthened sooner than others;
- Unpredictable: Most of the relevant vowels occur before voiceless fricatives (laugh, bath, past) or nasal clusters (dance, France, sample), but not all of the words in these categories underwent the change…. 

e.g. Traditionally, in English, the vowel in words like ‘moan [mʊun], bone, throne’ and the vowel in words like ‘mown [mʌʊn], own, thrown’ was different. In some dialects of English it still is. In areas neighbouring the dialects with the split, [ʊu] and [ʌʊ] are now merged to [ʌʊ].

e.g.: /a/ becoming /a/ and /ɑː/ (cf TRAP v BATH)
e.g.: /ʊ/ becoming /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ (cf FOOT v STRUT)

Neogrammarian Sound Change is typically found for:
• Sound changes with ‘unconditioned shifts of the phonetic target of a phoneme’ (Labov 1994: 526);
• Changes with simple and exceptionless conditioning;
• Movements such as raising, lowering, fronting, backing, rounding, unrounding, nasalisation
• Vocalisations of liquids and approximants
Lexical diffusion is often found in examples of:
• Lengthening and shortening, 
• Diphthongisation of mid and low vowels
• Consonant changes in place of articulation
• Metathesis

How are changes embedded in LANGUAGE and SPEECH COMMUNITY?

• Observe how changes spread through the language: do changes begin in some linguistic contexts and then spread to others?
  • /t/-glottalisation: V_#C > C_#C > V_#V > V_V‘get by’ > ‘built by’ > ‘get out’ > ‘butter’
• Observe how changes spread throughout the speech community: in which social groups do changes begin? How do linguistic changes spread geographically across the country?
• Early Labovian observations v present-day ‘identity’-based approaches

How are changes judged? Attitudes, correctness, slowing and accelerating changes...

• mergers seem disfunctional, but they're more common than splits
  • - / ɪə-ɛə/ (beer –bear) merger in NZE, /aʊ - ɛə / (cow – care) merger in Fens.
• Different changes are differently contested/'stigmatised': /h/ dropping; non-standard past tense forms; fewer – less; have got to – have to; the use of coda-less 'as far as‘; /ʊ/-unrounding.
• And of course 'correctness' leading to spelling pronunciations.

Most important question? Why does something change at a certain time? Why at different times in different languages?

We can kinda guess referring to social changes but we really can only guess and don't know too much about this.