Language is hierarchic - we move from sounds to words to phrases to sentences Language is embedded in gesture – gestures often accompany the verbal activity and can be learned (bye-bye) or instinctive (smile). Both can be and are adapted to a culture. Language is both arbitrary and non-arbitrary – names of things are arbitrary; sentence structure is less so. Language is vertical and horizontal – vertical – paradigmatic (verbs, pronouns); horizontal – syntagmatic (pulling together words, phrases, clauses) Language changes to outwit change – we can recombine parts to create new parts that are accepted by the community Languages are similarly structured – nouns, verbs, pronouns (more later) Language is heard as well as spoken W. F. Bolton (1981) has synthesized these and proposed that there are four basic properties of language. (PP #12) Language is productive/creative – with a finite number of sounds, language can meet our expressive needs without limit. Language is arbitrary – words for things have no necessary connection Language has duality – words have both sound and meaning (concepts)
verbal components mentioned before but they don’t have to. Consider the shrug to indicate that you don’t know or the crossed arms of a parent to indicate displeasure or the pointing in a direction to indicate location. What differentiates these components from the linguistic components is that they occur in the here-and-now. I can’t shrug yesterday or cross my arms to indicate displeasure tomorrow. As mentioned earlier these gestures can be taught (bye-bye) or they can be instinctive (smile, raised eyebrows, smirk, etc.). But they are not productive. A shrug is just that—it cannot create a different meaning for itself by adding anything to indicate when it was done, who else did it, how it was done, etc. A word of caution: since these postures and gestures can be part of the communication process which occurs within a culture, they will often have different meanings for different cultures. Roger Axtell, an author of several books on getting along in other cultures, has one on gestures and their meaning across cultures. One of his examples is the University of Texas gesture for “hook ‘em horns.” “Depending on where it is used, it can mean: a college rallying sign, a signal of infidelity, a voodoo-like curse, a symbol for ‘good luck,’ the Devil, or ‘you’re full of horse apples.’” Body Language and Animal Language
With the turn of the 21st century and the pervasiveness of social media, the use of acronyms has exploded to allow for faster texting, tweeting, etc.: IMHO, OMG, LOL, etc. (PP#29) They are also abbreviating words to create what has been referred to as “totesing.” (PP#30) They will use expressions like “totes tradge” (tragic), “totes emosh” (emotional), or simply abbreviate words such as “bluebs” (blueberries) as in “bluebs in yog are my favorite snack.” Linguists at CUNY’s Graduate Center and the Univ. of Pennsylvania have collected numerous examples of this practice and note that it is “about sounds and it conforms to the sometimes complicated sound system of English.” Thus there are many consonant clusters as in “subconch” and “aphrodeez.” They are also putting “sh” at the ends of words to sound “cute” as in “imposh.” Is this bad? Not necessarily since the users do follow certain phonological rules of English and we have been abbreviating words for a while (legit, delish). One of the main characteristics of any culture is that it is adaptive and the ability of language to change allows the expression of that adaptability. The interesting thing about the youth movements and their vocabularies is that the terms endure though the culture that gave rise to them does not necessarily. We’ll just have to wait to see if any of the recent expressions hang around as long as “cool” and “neat” have. Cultural Competence vs Cultural Performance (PP# 31 )
means that every time a new word enters the English vocabulary from another culture, an element of that culture comes in. (PP# 36) Celtic tribes inhabited England prior to the invasion by the Germanic tribes of the Angles and Saxons (449AD) and we have them to thank for the words “whiskey, “bog,” and “shindig,” also “crag” and “tor.” The language spoken at the time has been referred to as Anglo-Saxon or “old English.” Almost half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots, “be, “strong,” “water,” “the,” “you,” etc. After their colonization of the island, they settled down to become farmers and gave us the words pertaining to that endeavor – sheep, shepherd, ox, earth, plough, swine, dog, but also glee, laughter, and mirth. In 597 AD, Christianity was introduced to “Englaland,” i.e., the land of the Angles, and brought many Latin and Greek words for abstract thought and, of course, religious concepts, e.g., “bishop,” “angel,” “demon,” etc. The Viking invasions took place from 750-1050 and brought with them about 900 words, such as “get,” “hit,” “leg,” “low,” “root,” “want,” and “wrong.” This gave rise to English/Danish synonyms such as rear/raise (child), wish/want, craft/skill, hide/skin. The last great invasion took place in 1066 with the Normans coming from northern France. For almost 300 years, a dialect of French was used by the ruling