Linguistic Items

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used.It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, economic status, gender, level of education, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class or socio-economic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies .The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment.
Sociolinguistic variables:-
Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and interview them, assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the ideal sociolinguistic variable to
•be high in frequency,
•have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,
•be an integral part of larger structures, and
•be easily quantified on a linear scale.
When we talk about the linguistic items we find that this is a term used in linguistics refer to an individual linguistic form,from the viewpoint of its occurrence in an inventory and not in classification .for example, the vocabulary of a language ,as listed in dictionary, can be seen as a set of “lexical items”. Grammatical and phonological units are also included in these items.
"Thus, it is clear that the language each person acquires is a rich and complex construction hopelessly underdetermined by the fragmentary evidence available". (Chomsky).
Types of Linguistic items can be named as at phonological level,syntatic level and at lexical level.Different people have different views about the structure of a language. Some people agree with the transformational generative linguistics given by Chomsky. In “Aspect of the theory of Syntax”(1965) which consists of three components :
(a) A syntactic component ,comprising a basic set of phrase structure rules which together with lexical information provides the deep structure information about sentences,and a set of transformational rules for generative surface structures.
(b) A phonological component, which converts string of syntactic elements into pronunceable utterance.
(c) A semantic component, which provides representation of the meaning of lexical items to be used in a sentence.
The ways in which these components should be interrelated(especialy the relationships between semantics and syntax) have proved to be a source of continuing controversy between different linguists since the appearance of Aspects and alternative models of analysis have developed . as a result of these developments ,the status and classification of transformations varied a great deal in 1960s and 1970s.
Teleman says: -“After some time the idealized speaker-hearer of generative grammar was recognized as a well-known but rather special kind of citizen: the academic professional, writing (and thinking) in a highly standardized monological prestige language"
Whether speaking on or five languages, all individuals belong to at least one speech community, all of whose members share at least a single speech variety and the norms for it appropriate use. Language variation within and between speech communities can involve different languages or only contrasting styles of one language. In every society the differential power of particular social groups is reflected in language variation and in attitudes toward those variations. Typically, the dominant group promotes its patterns of language use as the model required for social advancement and use of a lower prestige language, dialect, or accent by minority group members reduces their opportunities for success in the society as a whole. Minority group members are often faced with difficult decisions regarding whether to gain social mobility by adopting the language patterns of the dominant group or to maintain their group identity by retaining their native speech style
Syntactic Variation When we talk about syntactic level we find that the native speaker has a tacit knowledge of the syntactic rules of his or her language and this comprises a large part of linguistic competence, Chomsky to over simplify somewhat these rules are of two major type, constitutive and regulative...
As the name suggests, syntactic variation involves syntactic differences among dialects. Keeping close to home, it is common in many Southern dialects to find the word "done" used as an auxiliary, as in "she done already told you" or "I done finished a while ago." In SAE, this isn't the case. And, in fact, many times people who want to imitate Southern American English speech often pick up on this rather salient property. Double modals (combinations of auxiliaries) are also common across parts of the South. Examples are: "I might could do it" or " or "He might would if you asked him nice enough." These are examples of syntactic variation. Another famous example is the use of so-called double negatives, as in "I didn't see nobody”.
Linguistic is best known as the formal study of grammatical system. Social scientists in recent years have been particularly interested in Chomsky notion of linguistic competent i.e. the study of speaker hearer’s knowledge office language defined as his control of rules by which meaning are encoded into sounds. It has been possible to show i.e. although the number of sentences in a particular language is infinitely varied they can in fact be generated from a finite body of rules. The processes by which speakers code meaning into sounds are largely automatic and hence only partially subject to conscious control regarding less if individual intent. The form his speech always depend on the grammatical system, of his language. And his interpretation of what he hears. Attempts to establish direct relationships between grammatical rules and broader social processes, however, suffer from the fact that until quite recently for grammatical analysis dealt only with relatively limited aspect of verbal messages.
Language can vary not only from one individual to the next but also from one sub section of speech community. People of different age, sex, social classes, occupations or culturally group in the same community will show variations in their speech. Thus language varied in geographical and social space. It seems probable that no language is at monolithic as our descriptive grammar suggests, wherever sufficient data are available we find diversity within languages on all level, phonological, grammatical and logical. Such diversity can be studied along three synchronic dimensions, geographical, social and stylistic. The geographical dimensions, of course, the main one which has occupied the tension of dialectologist and which has been presented in dialect atlases. Other type variation within languages however has received less attention. What is here term the social dimension of linguistic variation is core -related with the socially established identity of speaker addressed. Example are the special linguistic form used in Nootka to speak to our about children, fat people, dwarfs, hunchbacks, etc.
If we look upon language as a set of norms for linguistic behavior, we may ask: What are the rules of proper behavior? What does the word X actually mean? What is the correct pronunciation of the word X (pronunciation in the singular)? In earlier times, the linguistic clergy often thought of their task as that of preserving the original, i.e. God-given, correct form and meaning of words. Today, the correct pronunciation and meaning is something that linguistic specialists determine by means of adequate analysis and properly constrained use of their own intuition. The normative perspective is therefore somewhat less salient; rather, linguistic items are treated as independently existing objects with objective (sic!) properties. However, the basic philosophy is still there; it is usually taken for granted that there are unique and stable phonological, grammatical and syntactic properties inherent in words and sentences, and, hence, that the search for these properties is a meaningful enterprise. It is assumed that under the rich dialectal, phonostylistic and idiolect phonetic variation in the pronunciation of a given word, there is one unique phonological form. It is taken for granted that a given sentence has one well-defined syntactic structure, e.g. a specific constituency or dependency tree (or, in the case of syntactic ambiguity, a finite number of such structures) the meaning of lexical items can be adequately described in terms of a finite set of semantic features or a hierarchical organization of such features, rather than, say, a more indeterminate and vague meaning potential. Similarly, and perhaps even more questionably, sentences are assumed to have specific semantic representations defining "literal interpretations" of those sentences. In mainstream contemporary linguistics, each sentence is assumed to be map able onto a finite number of distinct meanings. That is, a sentence either does or does not have a particular meaning, a sentence either is or is not ambiguous, two sentences are or are not paraphrases of each other, etc. Yet, the study of the actual use of these sentences calls such an analysis into question; it appears that semantic interpretations are often more-or-less plausible. Rather than being unequivocally correct or absolutely excluded, many interpretations are more-or-less justified.
The assumption of underlying invariance is clearly made in modern psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology; language is regarded as a reified cognitive structure with fixed components. The kernels of linguistic items are constituted by the distinctive invariant properties, which are supposed to be clearly different from the redundant features. Thus, underlying phonological forms comprise a small and fixed set of phonological features, and word meanings are assumed to be simply set of essential features (necessary and sufficient conditions for some exemplar to fall under a certain concept. It is obvious that this approach obfuscates the facts that a given language is based on social and cultural norms and conventions, and that these norms are applicable in different degrees to the varying social contexts. Instead, linguistic rules are construed as mental processes.
Linguistic items and structures are usually regarded as being static and invariant. Along with these properties goes another property, viz. that of a temporality. Linguistic structures, such as semantic, syntactic and phonological representations, lack a time dimension; they are a temporal in nature. Culture is comprised of all items that are reproduced and proliferated through communication in the widest sense, including unintentional transmission of information. The direct cultural function of a cultural item is, unproblematically, the effect that prior items of the same type have performed in the past and that have caused the item to be reproduced again and again. For instance, a hammer, even if it is actually used as a paperweight, has the direct cultural function of helping to drive nails, because it is the repeated and successful performance of this effect (helping to drive nails) by hammers that has caused them to be produced again and again.
Linguistic items are cultural items, and it is sensible to ask what direct proper functions of a cultural kind they have. Language is a complex of different devices. A "linguistic device" can be a word, a surface syntactic form, a tonal inflection, a stress pattern, a system of punctuation and "any other significant surface elements that a natural spoken or written language may contain". A linguistic device has proliferated because it has served a describable, stable proper function.
“Lakoff and Johnson” summarize "the premise of objectivist linguistics from its origins in antiquity to the present" as follows:
"Linguistic expressions are objects that have properties in and of themselves and stand in fixed relationships to one another, independently of any person who speaks them or understands them. As objects, they have parts - they are made up of building blocks: “words are made up of roots, prefixes, suffixes, infixes; sentences are made up of words and phrases; discourses are made up of sentences."
. Most of the linguists like to think of linguistic items as having fixed and stable properties, among other things inert, literal meanings. This way of looking at linguistic phenomena as objects is coupled with a very popular model of linguistic communication, i.e. the one which portrays the communication process as the conveyance of a message, or, in other words, some kind of transportation of a certain, fixed message from the speaker to the listener, a transfer of given thoughts and feelings as if these thoughts and feelings were independent of and prior to the "encoding" and "decoding" processes in communication. This view is associated with the metaphor that meanings are objects.
Phonological Variation
One obvious area where speaking style shifts is how "carefully" we pronounce things. Specifically, we see that in "casual" speech, we often "drop" endings in words such as "hunting" which we might pronounce as something like “huntin”. This situation is a little different. Here, the variation in pronunciation represents variation at the level of the phoneme or at the level of phonotactic constraints on things like syllable shape.
In different dialect there is a difference between the vowel in the word "caught" and the vowel in the word "cot". These are a minimal pair. The first, "caught" has a lax, mid, rounded, back vowel (its phonetic symbol is a backwards "c"), while the latter is the low, back, unrounded vowel [a]. In a few dialects of American English, this difference has been neutralized, aka lost. That is, these two different phonemes have merged. Specifically, people who speak these dialects pronounce the vowel in "caught" as an [a]: [kat], thus rendering the two words "caught" and "cot" homophonous.
Why is this a case of phonological and not phonetic variation? Because, the result of this kind of variation is the loss of a phonological contrast. Whereas in different dialect these vowels are allophones of two different phonemes, the dialects that don't have this difference have lost a contrast. Another way of putting this is to say that the dialect that has lost the backwards "c" vowel that still have in different dialect, has one less vowel phoneme than these dialect has. What's most important here is that we understand that the difference is relevant at the level of the phoneme. If we talk about a Southern Accent, we're talking about a generalized property of English pronunciation in the Southern part of the US. But, Southern dialects have more than particular phonological properties.
Morphological level
Examples of morphological variation in the case of northern England and Southern Wales, where the -s suffix is used as a general present tense marker. In many other dialects of English, -s is reserved for marking the present tense in third person singular forms only. “I likes him.” “We walks all the time.” Another example comes from Appalachian English, which has a number of past tense forms that are non-standard. "Et" for "ate", "hEt" for "heated". These are all examples of morphological variations.
Semantic level
Often times, what people studying variation talk about when they discuss semantic variation is the different meanings that particular words have from dialect to dialect, or the different words that are used for the same thing in different dialects. We might more accurately refer to this as the study of lexical semantic variation. So, an example of a single word meaning different things is the compound "knocked up". In England it means 'rouse from sleep'. Here in the States it means, "to make pregnant". Other examples are words like "soda". This is a general term for soft drink. For speakers of other dialects, "soda" may mean seltzer water or club soda only. In some of these dialects, the general term for soft drink is "pop". In yet other dialects, the general term is "coke", while for others "coke" refers to only a specific brand of cola
Lexical level
A major area of linguistics item involves choice of vocabulary. We all know, for example, which words are "dirty" words in our language and when they are acceptable and when they are not acceptable to use. We also know which words are high-brow words that we use to impress people. In English, it is the case that we often use more Latinate words when we want to sound formal and impressive and intelligent. What sounds more impressive, for example, "divine" or "godly"? Some people say that "divine" sounds more learned. In other differences like "there are many factors" as opposed to "there are multiple factors”. We also have words that we know constitute the technical jargon of a particular field and we know how and when to use them. The vocabulary of pidgin and Creoles manifest extensive shifts in meaning. Many of these changes are the result of the inevitable broadening of reference involved in pidginization. If a given semantic field has to be covered by a few words rather than many, each word must off course signify a wider range of phenomena.
To conclude we can say that research in societies has dealt with socially determined selection in a variety of societies and at a variety of levels of analysis what aspects of language are subject to this kind of variation the problem is one which has never been completely neglected and social variations in speech have been observed in many different kind of societies around the world until quite recently however such social variations have tended to be described only when they were clearly reflected in the data gathered by linguists as part of their ordinary linguistic field word procedures although members of all societies categorize each other through speech groups differ in the linguistic means by which such categorization is accomplished what some groups accomplish by alternating between familiar and respectful personal pronouns such as tu and vous other achieve by shifting between Mr. Smith and John Still others may achieve similar ends by simply switching from a local dialect to a standard language. The major reason that such social variation in speech has not been studied systemically in all societies lies not in speech behavior of the population concerned, but rather in the way in which their speech has been recorded.
"A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting grammars, and their independence of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state, over wide ranges of variation, leave little hope that much of the structure of the language can be learned by an organism initially uninformed as to its general character." (Chomsky
In fact, a great deal of variation in speech performance is regular and patterned; the different variants are systematically favored or disfavored by various contextual factors (linguistic-structural, psychological, social, cultural etc.). In recent years such facts have been unearthed by proponents of so-called variation linguistics, who have analyzed phenomena as different as normal dialectal variation (Labov 1969, Cedergren & Sankoff 1974), pidgins and Creole languages (Decamp 1971), and variation in the interlanguages of second-language learners (Bickerton 1971, Hyltenstam 1978).
The fact that variations in linguistic performance are usually ignored by linguists and psychologists may also lead to an implicit assumption that the existing variations are not too extensive after all; one assumes that speakers, listeners and readers are very much alike as regards what they can produce, perceive and understand, and what strategies and linguistic operations they apply in performance. In the psychology of language use and reading we find many models of utterance production, utterance comprehension, and reading with universalistic pretensions. It is hoped that one can construct models of utterance planning, reading etc that are more or less independent of all the varying goals and expectations of different communication situations. Contrary to what such general models suggest, it seems likely that a great deal of our use of language and linguistic knowledge is task-oriented; looking for a number in the phone book and reading a poem by Wordsworth are, after all, quite different activities. Everyday small talk and academic discussions on complicated topics are in many ways rather different in character. Therefore, it remains to be seen what the common components of linguistic processing, if any, are.
However, linguistic performance does not only vary with the different communicative tasks. It also depends on the linguistic habits and knowledge of the persons involved. Here again a common attitude among psycholinguists and phoneticians is that all speakers and listeners behave in roughly the same way. Therefore, linguists and phoneticians are very often satisfied with using only a few subjects in their experiments. It seems to me that we are encouraged to consider this a safe strategy, because as linguists we entertain certain views of language and language users. Language is assumed to be a monolithic, stable and homogeneous system, and normal language users are assumed to share this system to a great extent (V:5). However, we would need a lot more of differential phonetics and psycholinguistics before we can safely state that native language users are indeed alike in their speaking, listening and reading strategies.
Linguistics has traditionally been concerned with written language, i.e. the language of the Holy Scriptures, the great authors, and later on simply with what is considered to be "good" written standrads, educated or "received" English, German (German Hochsprache), Swedish, etc. Furthermore, the focus has been on formal rather than semantic aspects. In fact, grammar has for centuries been the kernel of real linguistics.