Hannah Hobson- language of the law

Article on Parliamentary language

Parliament is a group of elected representatives that debate and decide upon new laws. It is made up of the House of Lords and representatives of counties and cities forming the House of Commons. The United Kingdom's Parliament is the oldest in the world; it originated in 1250-1300 during the Middle English. Etymonline tells you the word origin and history of words and for the word 'Parliament', it informed me that the word comes from the old French word 'Parlement' which means 'speaking, talk.' The spelling was altered in the 1400's to fit with M.L. Parliamentum. Over the years it has given the English language many expressions and phrases that often take on other meanings. An example is 'Toe the Line.' In general language it means the listener must obey an order; it means there is an invisible line that is understood by everyone that nobody should cross. In Parliament, it is a literal line. The Commons Chamber is a long, narrow corridor where the pews were arranged when Parliament first began.

These are some examples of specialist Parliamentary terms and their meanings.

The specialist Parliamentary term	What the term means
Bill	A set of proposals that might become a law if Parliament agrees to it
Coalition	An arrangement between more than one political party. This would usually happen when no party wins more than half of the seats in Parliament.
Act	A law passed by the Scottish Parliament that has received Royal Assent.
Democracy	This means 'rule by the people' so everyone in the country should have a say in what happens and what is decided.
Electorate	The collective name given to all the people who have the right to vote
Ideology	An ideology is a set of ideas about how the country should be run. Each political party in the Parliament has its own ideology.
Legislation	The process of making new laws.

Ministers	MP's who are also members of the Scottish Government
Parliamentary Bureau	The group of people who decide what Parliament will discuss and decide each week.
Petition	A way for a member of the public to let the Parliament or government know they would like something to change.
Royal Assent	When a bill has been passed, the Queen is asked for her approval.
Scrutinise	When MPs question the work of the Government

Parliament is steeped in history and tradition, and parliamentary debates in the House of Commons are often very lively and noisy with Members of Parliament calling out to the opposition, waving order paper and laughing.

During proceedings one word is often shouted in succession: "Hear, Hear, Hear!". It is often reported in Hansard. The spelling is not "Here Here Here.'' I also found out that the phrase 'Hear Ye!' appears a couple of times in Shakespeare's King Henry VI, thought to be from 1590 or 1591.

It is widely thought that it goes back to the history of debates. The original words were "Hear Him, Hear Him!", called out by members who are supporting the speaker if they were being interrupted by the opposition's noises and to force them to listen. Much easier than saying "Hear the Honourable Member". This became shorter and eventually was "Hear Hear!", and was used to show agreement and support of something that is being said due to the fact that applause is very rarely heard in Parliament.

Parliamentary language has rules of politeness in the House of Commons. Part of the speakers duty is to ensure that MPs don't use rude language and don't accuse each other of lying or misinterpreting each other's words. Some words that do not conform to this and has caused objection are rat, swine, git, coward, traitor, hooligan etc.

How people speak to their pets

 

The way people talk to their pets has always been something that interests me. I watch how people communicate with their pets and for some reason pet owners treat their animals like people, or family even.

 

I find that with dog owners it is especially noticeable. It seems as though they are trying to have a proper conversation with their dog, even when they know the dog is unable to answer. Why do people do this? Surely you may as well be talking to yourself? You can also see this with cat owners, although less common than dog owners. I myself have a cat and sometimes find myself talking to her, but why?

 

Deborah Tannen of Georgetown University based her studies on examples drawn from tape recordings. She discovered that in some cases, pets are used as a tool to mediate conflict between partners or even shift the conflict to humour. She also found that in a recording, a dog was used to frame the couple as a family. The male does this by talking the dog and addressing his partner as "Mummy" and therefore positioning her as the dog's mother. Tannen also claims that the couple were using "baby talk." According to Bilger, 84% of pet owners refer to themselves as "Mummy" and "Daddy."

 

In another example used by Tannen, this time involving a cat, the pet is used as a resource of communication between a mother and a daughter. The mother said "Pay lots of attention to the cat; she misses you so much." By saying this, the mother was trying to show that she herself missed her daughter, but used the cat as a resource to avoid conflict with her daughter.

 

Tannen also looks at the theory of ventriloquizing which is where family members use speaking as their pets as a way of communicating with each other. For example saying things like "Can you say.."

 

Stanley Coren also looked at the animal-human bond. He carried out some online surveys involving around 1000 people. He discovered something very strange about how the pet owners of today seem the "blur the lines between children and pet dogs."

He found that 81% of people now consider their dogs to be part of the family and in equal status to their children. Also, 54% of Americans now consider themselves to be "pet parents" rather than pet owners.

 

Coren found that 77% of pet owners talk to their pets as if they were actually family members. Other research found that links to Coren's research showed that owners often speak to their pets using similar rhythms that you use when talking to children. The same can be said for nicknames. Often parents have several nicknames for their children and use them in different situations and surveys show it can be the same for dogs.

 

In conclusion, research has shown that people talk to their pets for different reasons, for resources of communication, because they see them as part of the family and it could just simply be because they are lonely. I look forward to seeing what I can find when I research this further.

 

Alice Lirette

Why do people find it easier to send their feelings via electronic devices ?

 

                                                                                                  SEXT ME

 

Morning sunshine coast. Here's to my first ever blog and hopefully my last. Here is one of the many things I hate.

After a multitude of time spent pondering and observing I feel like I have the right to conclude that people just don't talk anymore. Instead of talking they text, no punctuation, no grammar, LOL this and XD that. It seems that people have hit the evolutionary cul de sac and that all we have left are a bunch of half tards pseudo communicating with others in a dialect that resemble more what primates yell out than our standard Queens English.

 But I won't let myself lose sight of the reason I am writing this. Why do people find it easier to send their feelings via electronic devices rather than an old fashioned tete a tete?

Besides the fact that I threw up in my mouth a little, I was shocked after receiving a text from a female friend saying how she feels about me followed by a close up picture of her poontang. Why did she feel more comfortable about doing that through her phone and not telling me in person when I had spent most of my time with her that day? Maybe that's the problem with "the younger generation" we leave nothing to the imagination.

A university in Michigan conducted an experiment with 600 mobile phone users.

Results showed that primarily, people find texting preferable as they have more time to think about what to reply compared to a traditional conversation. People are afraid of rejection so if what they send isn't taken well they can deny that they sent it due to someone stealing their phone or some other lame excuse, whereas words uttered have no return policy, is this creating a false stem of security? If you are interested in viewing the full in-depth study then visit sparkingdawn.com on their article entitled "texting makes us more honest".

But when you are sitting next to that person and they text you, "how are you?" I don't know about you, but that blows me away and is a major turn off.  I'm not going to be hypocritical though, I hate texting but I do it, hence my self loathing but in my defense I mainly do it because the only way people recognize your existence these days is through your user name so here's a shout out to all the sexyplayboy69xoxo bitches out there I love all of you!

This leads to my final question; will talking soon be an art as valuable as writing is now? This is why I have chosen this subject to conduct research in for my course work for next year. Here's me signing out, sext me maybe ? xx.

                                  

                                                                 Théodore arshad

Where does MLE come from?

"Wagwan fam?" a famous contraction of "what is going on" and "family". We are all familiar with this "chavvy" greeting. It is from MLE (Multicultural London English), which is a dialect that emerged in the late 20^th century. It has African language, Caribbean language and cockney roots that have fused together as a result of multilingualism (using multi languages). This was as a result of creolization whereby, as defined by Robin Cohen (Emeritus Professor and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme-funded Oxford Diasporas Programme, University of Oxford), new mixed cultures emerge forming new identities and language to become different to those they possessed in the original cultures.

MLE is a pidgin language which has become the mother tongue of a community, also known as a creole, as defined by David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of language. It contains elements of Caribbean, mostly Jamaican language and cockney (London slang) as a creole emanates from two or more languages being mixed together. It gradually took its status as a creole as young people growing up in London were exposed to this pidgin language or multiple languages spoken all at once and after some generations it became consolidated as a mother tongue. Every language has features of lexicon, grammar, dialect and phonology.

Grammatically, the verb, "to be", is regularised with "was" becoming universal for all conjugations (verb forms that go with each pronoun) and "weren't" likewise for "was not", a negative conjugation i.e "I was", "you was", "he was" and "I weren't", "you weren't". Tag questions are limited to "Isn't it", comprehended as "innit". This is a feature of Robin Lakoff's 10 assumptions on women's language hence it can be said to be overt prestige as women tend to use this kind of language to gain appear as having a higher social status and because of this unlikely feature of MLE it shows that it is a mixture of informal and formal languages. The newly formed adjectives, which modify a noun or a pronoun, "buff", "piff", "lush", "peng", are used in place of "good". This makes the language hard to decode by a non-member of the group hence it follows Basil Beinstein's assumptions, it is restricted code whereby speakers have background knowledge and share common understanding.

Similar to British English MLE is non-rhotic the letter, "r", is not pronounced e.g "Most words are pronounced from the front of the mouth (fronting)  of /ʊ/ is less advanced in London than in periphery, lack of fronting of /ʊ/ in inner city is conservative, matching Caribbean Englishes. This is an example of covert prestige as an accent is put on to show 'membership' to a community giving MLE "street cred. The speakers cannot help but reveal their low social class. The onset of "face" is raised resulting in variants like [eɪ] and /aɪ/. There is the H-dropping e.g "ting" for "thing" and "owever" for "however". Most commonly, MLE has glottal stops (leaving a gap between vocals) e.g /bʌʔn̩/ for "button" similar to cockney language showing that it contains features of multiple languages.

Msiziwethu Mbiba

dɔgz ənd fənetɪks

If you own a dog long enough you may become one of those people who is constantly claiming 'oh my dog is so smart he understands everything I say' but does your dog really know what you're talking about? If you asked him or her to run /rən / to the bottom of the garden roll /roʊl/twice and then sit /sɪt/and wait /weɪt /there, they would just sit there on the spot where you said sit and wait. But why? If a dog can understand you as you are saying, actually comprehend the English language surely it should be no problem. Well I am sorry to burst your bubble but what they can understand, are the phonetics.

 

A dogs hearing is considerably more powerful than a humans so you can assume that sound is very important to a dog and phonetics are all about sound. Ask a dog to sit enough times and eventually they will do the action you are training them to do upon hearing this arrangement of sounds and it is all in the sounds, you could train a dog to jump /dʒəmp/to the word sit and /sɪt/ to the word jump, if they understood the word the dog would Jump if asked to jump, no matter how bizarrely you have trained it.

 

I will however admit that they associate certain words with a strong memory or emotion, which could come across as an understanding. If I say vet in front of my dog he will put his tail between his legs and slink off behind a sofa. He doesn't know what the word means but he knows that that order of sounds means it is time to go to some horrible place, I get the same reaction if I say that 'we have been to the vets', he picked up on the sounds of the lexeme vet. If he understood English he would know he had nothing to worry about as it was all in the past tense.  

 

There is the case of chaser a border collie that learnt 1000 words, all of which were a different name for a toy. It looks very impressive saying get a toy and the dog coming back with one of the ten toys but this is much the same as saying fetch, just with a different order of sounds. The dog knows that the sounds for /bɔl /means a different object to the sounds for/boʊn/, however say bring me the rugby, golf or football /rəgbi/gɑlf//fʊtˌbɔl/ and you will notice that most of the time the dog will pick the first ball it sees. However train a dog to understand post modifiers such as 'bring me the large green ball', the dog would have to distinguish between two balls which are green then would have to know which is large and which is small. That would show them starting to understand our language

 

So does your dog really understand what you are saying to them?

 
Conor Shields

Park Magazine Blog Article

Sex vs. Gender

What is the distinction between sex and gender? When faced with this question, many would assume that one is a synonym for the other. I beg to differ.

Sex is the biological differences, referring to chromosomes and sex cells, whereas gender describes the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine. We learn our gender from the word go; right from birth we are socially 'gendered' by putting a baby boy in Blue, and a baby girl in Pink. Why is this? To highlight the difference between male and female, or does it go deeper in to gender roles within society?

Monash University have carried out numerous studies on gender roles and the role of language within. They came up with the theory that while your sex as male or female is a biological fact that is the same in any culture, what that sex means in terms of your gender role as a 'man' or a 'woman' in society can be quite different cross culturally. In sociological terms 'gender role' refers to the characteristics and behaviours that different cultures attribute to the sexes. What it means to be a 'real man' in any culture requires male sex plus what our various cultures define as masculine characteristics and behaviours, likewise a 'real woman' needs female sex and feminine characteristics.

For example, masculinity in England would stereotypically involve language that is generally taboo, in short term taking to symbolise power and superiority, and the fact that males are the dominant sex.

On the other hand, females are expected to use language in a very different way. Theorists such as Robin Lakoff have pointed out that women are seen to use linguistic features such as tag questions, supposedly for confirmation, connoting uncertainty and the inferior sex.

Dominance theory

This is the theory that in mixed-sex conversations men are more likely to interrupt than women. It uses a fairly old study of a small sample of conversations, recorded by Don Zimmerman and Candace West at the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California in 1975. The subjects of the recording were white, middle class and under 35. Zimmerman and West produce in evidence 31 segments of conversation. They report that in 11 conversations between men and women, men used 46 interruptions, but women only two.

This theory is in accordance with the 'gender roles' specific to England certainly in the 70s when the second wave Feminist movement was taking place, but is it still relevant today? Surely times have moved on since the days of the women being the submissive housewives and men being the dominant breadwinners?

In conclusion, the distinction between male and female roles in society, and subsequently their language choices interest me greatly, and it is something I would like to research further.

Leah Johnston

 

Nickname Development - How much control do people have over their nickname?

The use of nicknames is common in today's society, from popular TV personalities and characters such as 'Arg' and 'Smithy' to places - 'the Big Apple'.  A nickname is a noun attributed to a person or object that is different from the person's given name; it can be used instead of or alongside the 'given name'. In theory people should have more control over their nickname than given name as nicknames are usually developed at a later age by a social group such as school class, but how much control do people really have over their own nicknames? 

A researcher in Taiwan carried out a study to investigate nicknaming, Liao found that boys were more likely than girls to have a nickname, and that 57% of those with a nickname disliked them. This could be because a lot of nicknames are based on an individual's characteristics, and these aren't always positive! For example, a person wearing glasses may be called 'four-eyes' or an overweight person could be called 'fatty' or 'chubster'. These are derogatory names so it is unlikely that a person would appreciate being called them, but they are easily formed by others as they can be decided just by looking at a person and are commonly used so don't require any use of imagination. It could be questioned why people allow others to call them a name they do not like, but actually how much power do we really have to stop unpleasant nicknaming? If a nickname catches on and is used by a wide group of people then it becomes very difficult for the individual to stop it. They can't control the behaviour of others and protesting could cause more unpleasant nicknaming! Sometimes nicknames just stick, whether the individual likes it or not. Personally, I would rather my art teacher had called me Chloe rather than 'Chlod' but there was just no stopping her, and two years later it's stuck!

Attitudes to nicknames can vary depending on society, if we travel across the pond to the USA, research by Busse shows that 70% of high school students with a nickname liked their nickname. This could be down to the different reasons behind nicknames formed in America, in Taiwan they often seemed to be based on negativity and insults, whereas in America it is thought a nickname makes students more popular! The reason behind the seemingly more positive nicknaming in America could be caused by different social rules between Taiwan and America. It is possible that American schools have stricter bullying policies than schools in Taiwan – mildly insulting nicknaming in Taiwan could be seen as humorous whereas in American classrooms it may not be tolerated. This would cause nicknaming to focus on more positive qualities, for example 'speedy' for a fast runner or 'chuckles' for a funny person.  They may also focus more on altering a person's real name by adding suffixes such as 'Whitey' for the surname White, in fact Shankle believed that there wasn't a name that Americans couldn't alter to form a nickname!  

Nicknames have been a feature in society for years and look like they are here to stay; maybe it is just dependant on luck as to what to what type of nickname a person will develop, be it positive or negative!

Chloe Humphreys

Sociolect and language formation

   Three pictures of a sheep used to literally mean three sheep. In a time with no language to express this, people were locked in a state of silence. When someone handed another person an object this meant a transaction was expected from the giver, objects replaced words. The receiver would then show a price in coin and the two would grunt in general agreement or disagreement similarly to how chimps interact .Agriculture and early language formation have a very close link (.http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s848585.htm) With language came vast intelligence, ideas could now be expressed which had been locked away or lost in translation between brain, hammer and stone. Early man began to transcend as the dominant species as they possessed a unique way of communicating that was far superior to their animal prey, this allowed for intelligent planning and gave humans a constant edge above rivals. This spoken language was forced into being communicated in a silent form, and so the alphabet was pressed into formation… so theorists believe.

I found that little academic research has been done on the actual formation of Sociolects. What I can explain is the formation of my own and how it juxtaposes that of early language formation. My personal Sociolect has developed with a few of my friends to reach the point where it would be possible to have a conversation entirely using words we have formed from our root word. Almost identical to how early language was formed; a central word or sound (the five vowels/tease) is naturally expanded into various words through contractions, borrowings, phrases and play much like how modern English formed. Comedy greatly catalyses my Sociolect expansion, with the reward for making an inventive or further abstraction of the root word rewarded with laughs or interesting group partnership. This partnership usually leads to a naturally formulated meaning for the abstraction of the root word from the volume and tone that becomes associated with it that works in a comical way. For example the closer an abstraction sounds to another the word the higher the chance it will replace that word entirely in conversation. Such is the case now that words have been fully replaced in natural conversation eventually leading to a secretive yet basic way of communicating.

  "People participating in recurrent communication situations tend to develop similar vocabularies, similar features of intonation and characteristic bits of syntax and phonology that they use in these situations" – (Ferguson 1944 : 20)

  It seems many similarities occur between sociolect and language formation, abstractions of my root word have risen and fallen in usage similar to how trends in popular language rise and fall, comedy led to the expansion of my own sociolect in numerous ways leading to the formation of entirely new words which only people familiar with the sociolect would understand. So what separate's my sociolect of newly formed words from becoming a language entirely? Do not enough people speak it?  Is it too underdeveloped and noncomplex?  In a language with its own miniscule micro– languages, one thing is for sure – we don't need hieroglyphics anymore.

By Rob Strutt

Language Acquisition

Learning a language is child's play. Ha. Anyway, less of that... Language acquisition is the process whereby humans learn their (usually) first language. This is a process that starts at the very beginning of a person's life, when they first experience communication through their parents. The language acquired is usually spoken language. There are many theories based around the process of language acquisition, Chomsky's theory is considered to be one of the "main" of these theories.

Noam Chomsky believes that children are born with an inherited ability to learn any human language, he believes that every child has a 'language acquisition device' (LAD, bit sexist really) which encodes the main features of a language and its grammatical structure into the child's brain. Chomsky points out that a child could not possibly learn a language through imitation alone (having said that, my youngest brother's first word was actually 'Tesco', which I believe may have had a lot to do with imitation, or possibly the strong influence of slogans, right Harry?) because the language spoken around them is highly irregular – adult's speech is often broken up and even sometimes ungrammatical (unless your father is Stephen Fry or you are a member of the Royal Family). Chomsky's theory applies to all languages as they all contain nouns, verbs, consonants and vowels and children appear to be 'hard-wired' to acquire the grammar. Every language is extremely complex (with the possible exception of the language of TOWIE), often with subtle distinctions which even native speakers are unaware of, such as slang terms and differences in pronunciation. There are undeniable factors of evidence that support Chomsky's theory. For example, it has been found that children learning to speak never make grammatical errors such as getting their subjects, verbs and objects in the wrong order and if an adult purposely something grammatically incorrectly, the child would notice. However, children often say things that are ungrammatical such as 'daddy car', which they cannot have learnt through pure imitation. Also, mistakes such as 'I drawed' instead of 'I drew' show they are not learning through imitation alone but actually learning language patterns and working things out for themselves.

However, Chomsky's theory can be criticized; at the time his theory was conceived, it was in stark contrast to Skinner's theory of language acquisition in his book, Verbal Behavior. Skinner believed that the process of infants acquiring language had a lot more to do with imitation; he formed the concept of the echoic. This refers to a verbal response coming from a verbal stimulus; basically when a parent says "Cat. Cat. Can you say C-A-T?" and the child responds with something along the lines of "Of course I can, do you think I'm stupid?" or (perhaps more seriously) "C-aaa...caa?".

There are strong arguments in both these theories, and I think definitely imitation plays a large role in children acquiring and producing language, to the degree of which Skinner or Chomsky believed I am unsure. I look forward to broadening my knowledge of this subject in the second year.

Charlotte Muir

 

Vhy zee Germans speak like zis

 

Impersonations of foreign speakers of English are often used to create humorous effect in television. Sitcoms such as 'Allo Allo' use exaggerated accents in a theatrical manner in order to highlight the funny, quirky mistakes learners make and stir up laughter within the audience. The unusual way in which learners order their utterances and pronounce certain sounds can sometimes leave us baffled. But I'm here to study why they make the mistakes they do, and how they cope with learning the English language. I'm focusing on Germans in particular, and the difference it makes, if any, in how old you are when you begin learning the English language. Fortunately, I have four young bilingual cousins, a German grandmother and two half-German uncles to use as my guinea pigs!

 

Although both English and German belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, there are several common errors that crop up incessantly. These all sprout from the differences in phonological features, grammar, the alphabet, use of vocabulary and tense (put forward by Frankfurt International School).

 

Firstly, there are a few mispronunciations that can be heard during speech. Although the German alphabet contains the same twenty six letters as ours (plus an added four 'umlauted' letters) and the majority of our letters look the same, they are pronounced differently. Sometimes German speakers have trouble producing some of our sounds simply because of the fact that these sounds do not exist in their language. An example of this is the 'th' sound in words such as 'this' and 'that'. Germans often make the error of pronouncing 'the' as /və/ or /zə/ and 'that' as /væt/ or /zæt/, replacing the /θ/ sound with /v/ sound, (or in some cases /vet/ or /zet/ due to the muddling of the /e/ and /æ/ sound).

 

Another mispronunciation of sounds occurs when reciting the alphabet. In Germany, the letter 'I' is pronounced similar to /i:/ and the letter 'e' is pronounced similar to /I/. Errors also occur in written work as 'a' is commonly replaced with 'r' due to 'a' being pronounced similarly to our 'r' and 'e' being replaced with 'I' due to the same reason.

 

Tense also becomes regularly muddled attributable to the fact that the German language does not have a progressive form. Germans may say 'I can come now, I see you there' when they are missing out the all important 'will' to create a continuous tense. Mishaps are also spotted when Germans use the present perfect tense in the wrong way, as they often use it to function as a conversational past tense phrase such as 'Yesterday I have been swimming' as opposed to our 'I went swimming yesterday.'

Through studying my relatives and looking for differences between them, I realised that even though both sets of my cousins were brought up in the same conditions, one set held stronger accents than the other. All of my cousins have been brought up into families where they have only been permitted to converse with their parents in English; however, one set shares a German parent and the other shares two English parents. This shows that even if children are conditioned in the same way, the accent of one parent deeply affects them (especially the German parent being the mother). The mother figure often holds strong bonds between her and her children and I have yet to find research and theories that reflect and support my findings. I eagerly await to complete my investigation and broaden my knowledge of Germans learning English.

By Charley Vincent