Learner resource 4 – Viewpoints and theories on Language

EXTRACT A: taken from: ‘I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language’ John Humphreys (2007)

FROM: So in future …

TO: …And they must be stopped.

EXTRACT B: taken from: ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation’, Deborah Tannen (1992)

Having done the research that led to this book, I now see that my husband was simply engaging the world in a way that many men do: as an individual in a hierarchical social order in which he was either in a one-up or on-down. In this world, conversations are negotiations in which people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand if they can, and protect themselves from others’ attempts to put them down and push them around. Life, then, is a contest, a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure. I, on the other hand, was approaching the world as many women do: as an individual in a network of connections. In this world, conversations are negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus. They try to protect themselves from others’ attempts to push them away. Life, then, is a community, a struggle to preserve intimacy and avoid isolation. Though there are still hierarchies in this world too, they are hierarchies more of friendship than of power and accomplishment.

EXTRACT C: Communication Accommodation Theory (Howard Giles):

Howard Gile’s Communication Accommodation Theory premises that society and individuals attribute different levels of prestige to the ways in which we speak. For example those who speak in Received Pronunciation are generally deemed to be of a higher social status than those who speak in a broad regional accent. Giles suggests that when speakers, who each have different accents, converse they will often seek to lessen the perceived societal status gap by adapting the way in which they speak. When we adjust our speech to ‘accommodate’ those to whom we speak this is called ‘Convergence’. When a speaker who is perceived to speak in an accent that is linked to a higher social status chooses to downplay their accent this is called ‘Downward Convergence’. Conversely when a speaker who is deemed to have an accent that is linked to a lower social status adapts their accent to more closely match the other speaker this is called ‘Upward Convergence’. If both speakers choose to adapt their accents towards each other this is termed ‘Mutual Convergence’. Often the power dynamic between speakers can be identified by witnessing who adapts the way they speak to match whom.

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Independent language research (Component 03)

EXTRACT D: Taken from

An important concept in the linguistic study of interaction is that of 'face'. The study of face – or 'facework' – is related to our everyday concept of respect and politeness, familiar from expressions such as 'to save face' or 'to suffer a loss of face'. Linguistic studies of face focus on the way in which we use language to acknowledge the fact that people have face 'needs'.

The concept of 'face' in the study of linguistic interaction derives from the work of Goffman (1967), who observed that face had to do with the 'positive social value' that we like to maintain in social interactions. During any one encounter, the interactants will each have a certain face and will produce utterances that take into consideration each other's face in this particular situation. In different situations, a single individual's face will be constructed differently…

… One of the most prominent conceptualisations of face is Brown and Levinson's model (1987), which claims to provide a universal account of how face-work operates (although it has been the subject of much debate). Brown and Levinson suggested that there are two distinct types of face: 'positive' and 'negative'. Our positive face reflects our desire to be accepted and liked by others, while our negative face reflects our wish to have the freedom to do what we want and to have independence. Brown and Levinson observe that, generally, people cooperate in maintaining each other's face needs. However, the nature of interaction means that – intentionally or unintentionally – speakers often find themselves producing utterances that threaten one or both types of face: what Brown and Levinson called 'face-threatening acts' (FTAs). Obvious examples include insults or expressions of disapproval, which can harm the addressee's positive face; however, more innocuous speech acts such as requests can also be face-threatening, by rubbing up against an interactant's desire to be free to do what they want to do (their negative face).

EXTRACT E: Taken from:

In the spirit of cognitive revolution in the 1950's, Chomsky argued that children will never acquire the tools needed for processing an infinite number of sentences if the language acquisition mechanism was dependent on language input alone.

Consequently, he proposed the theory of Universal Grammar: an idea of innate, biological grammatical categories, such as a noun category and a verb category that facilitate the entire language development in children and overall language processing in adults.

Universal Grammar is considered to contain all the grammatical information needed to combine these categories, e.g. noun and verb, into phrases. The child’s task is just to learn the words of her language (Ambridge & Lieven). For example, according to the Universal Grammar account, children instinctively know how to combine a noun (e.g. a boy) and a verb (to eat) into a meaningful, correct phrase (A boy eats).

This Chomskian (1965) approach to language acquisition has inspired hundreds of scholars to investigate the nature of these assumed grammatical categories and the research is still ongoing.

EXTRACT F: taken from: Second Language Acquisition: Reconciling Theories by Vera Menezes

Based on an empirical study, Long [12] observed that in conversations between native and non-native speakers, there are more modifications in interaction than in the input provided by the native speakers. He does not reject the positive role of modified input, but claims that modifications in interactions are consistently found in successful SLA. Long [13] suggests that negotiation for meaning, especially negotiation work that triggers interactional adjustments by the NS or more competent interlocutor, facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways. (pp. 451-452)

Larsen-Freeman and Long [1] argue that the interactionist views are more powerful than other theories “be- cause they invoke both innate and environmental factors to explain language learning” (p. 266). I would add that they are the first to view language not only as a matter of syntactic structures but also as a matter of discourse.

The interactionist research uses data recorded from free conversation or controlled conversation tasks.

Version 11© OCR 2017

Independent language research (Component 03)