Koasati: had such different gender dialects that it was thought there was two different languages
socio-economic class
Labov’s /r/ study
in NY people pronounced r differently
Saying the phrase: Fourth Floor (the r’s would be there sometimes and dropped other times)
post-vocalic r: end of the work or after a vowel
Visited different Stores: Saks 5th Avenue, Macy’s, S. Kleino “r” was pronounced at Saks (high class)
Macy’s has the most variation in the middle class
Middle class shows the changes in language
ethnic affiliation
It is about affiliation and the historical study.
It is not absolute.
Most important now in a 2012 context in America
Fixin’ to ~finna
LabovØ He be playin’ basketball ~ He playin’ basketball
Probably will continue to be the most significant organizing parameter of sociolectal variation for the next several years along with socio-Economic class and political ideology
synchronic
at a single time
diachronic
Across time
Diachronic does not mean historical
Historical linguistics is important
language is always changing and there are so many things that only become obvious because we are studying the changes
How does language get new words?
productivity
coinage
acronyms/initializations
clipping
blending
borrowing
functional shift
derivation
compounding
semantic shift
Productivity
new words all the time
lexicon is changing and accpeted but not usually accepting of grammatical changes
coinage
(ex nihilo)do words really come out of nothing? No
Kleenex
Q-tip
Acronym
is actually pronounced as a word by putting the sounds together
Scuba
Initializations
say the first letters
FDA
Clipping
cut off the words and use part
us- usual
fab-fabulous
Blending
putting two parts of words together
Blo-No
spork
Functional Shift/ Conversion
using one part of speech as another part of speech without any morphological trappings (without doing anything)
ex- xerox (I can use the xerox machine. Go xerox this for me.)
Borrowing
loan words: use words from another language and in turn are borrowing some of the culture ex- food is a great example: taco
some langauges are less accpeting-German
calquing: borrowing parts of words
ex-German Wolkenkratzer: Came from our skyscraper
Derivation
morphemes that created new words
verb can be made into a noun by adding a derivational ending