Unidad 3

Recursos de
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Unidad 3: El lenguaje y el pensamiento

Ideas claves de la Unidad 3.

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Contents
SFL .................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Register Variables ........................................................................................................................................ 3
Sociolinguistics ................................................................................................................................................. 4
Language Acquisition ....................................................................................................................................... 6

Systemic Functional Linguistics

Halliday claimed that language is considered primarily functional and that the structure or form of language
is important only to serve the function. “a theory of linguistics must incorporate the functions of language in
use.” Meaning and form are always driven by its context and speaker’s communicative goals.

Form is still important. The difference is more the orientation. SFL views grammar as a study of meanings,
but obviously those meanings are expressed through forms, which need to be analysed.

SFL identifies three levels or metafunctions. We communicate meaning simultaneously on all three levels.
These levels are called ideational, interpersonal, and textual components.

In analyzing a text, one should begin with its context and type (register and genre).

When a specific community interacts in specific situations, then we can identify the existence of a specific
culture. There are habits, norms and conventions which members of the community accept and respect in
order to belong. The situation within which we interact leads us to make choices about the language we wish
to use. These choices can be described as register.

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There are three main variables that characterize any register, namely: field (the topic being talked about),
tenor (the relationship of participants) and mode (the channel of communication). These variables help to
explain how individual’s use of language is predominantly dependent upon functions.

Register Variables
Field Topic Nature of social activity and
role of language (vital to the
activity or secondary)
Subject matter
Tenor Participants Status of social power
Affect
Mode Channel Spoken or written
Action or reflection

Although registers to not map perfectly onto metafunctions, we can frequently equate field with the
ideational function, tenor with the interpersonal function and mode with the textual function. Within each
“group” we can then analyse specific lexico-grammatical functions and the ways that we use clauses.

All the types of analyses which we have previously considered can still be carried out within a SFL perspective,
including the analyses of expression (phonetics and phonology), content (lexicogrammar and semantics) and
context. The difference, as I have mentioned, is the orientation. Context, purpose and meaning come first.

The ways a specific community uses language within its culture can be defined a genre. It should be possible
to identify several text types which are created for particular purposes, have particular stages (think of an
essay, a report, or even a movie) and particular linguistic features. We use the term genre to analyse how
people use the resources of one or more register to achieve certain communicative goals.
A genre is therefore more specific than a register. A register influences the language choices which we make,
and the genre narrows these choices further. In this way, we can identify different expectations for academic
essays and research papers (genres), although both can be said to be examples of “Academic English” (a
register).

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Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of how language and social factors, such as ethnicity, social class, age, gender,
and educational level, are related.

Each person has a unique way of speaking that results from physical, social, and cultural factors: a certain
tone of voice, often-used words, characteristic idioms and phrases. This personal, individual way of speaking
is known as an idiolect. But an individual has to be able to communicate with other people. So the idiolects
of people living and working together cannot be so different that they are not understandable to one
another.

A language (or speech) community is a group of people who live, work, socialize, and communicate with one
another. The shared, unique characteristics of their speech are called a dialect. We sometimes think of a
dialect as being a special, regional characteristic. In Ecuador we identify how people speak in Esmeraldas,
and in the United States people talk about a New York accent. But everyone belongs to a language
community; therefore, everyone speaks a dialect.

Standard American English (SAE) is the prestige dialect used in business, education, and the media. In the
past, the prestige dialect in Great Britain was so closely associated with the British Broadcasting Corporation
that it is sometimes referred to as BBC English. Today, however, the BBC encourages its news readers
(announcers) to use regional dialects.

Many lexical items vary according to region. This is semantic variation.

There is phonological variation (that is, words are pronounced differently) in the different regions of the
United States. This is part of what makes up the regional accent. These pronunciation differences can be
traced back to the regional variation in the English of the early colonists, who came from different parts of
England and spoke English differently.

_ Do you /pak yə ka/ or /park yɔr kar/? The deleted /r/ is characteristic of the Boston area.

_ Is your mother’s sister your /ant/ or /.nt/? Do you pronounce eye as the monophthong /a/ or the diphthong
/ay/? Southerners use the first pronunciation; northerners use the second.

_ Do you say /dɪs/ instead of /dɪs/, /tɪŋk/ instead of /θɪŋk/? The substitution of /d/ for /d/ and /t/ for /θ/ is
characteristic of speech in the Bronx, New York.

There are phonological variations between SAE and modern British English. _ Do you say /təmeto/ or
/təmato/? Do you say /detə/ or /d.tə/? Do you say /nuz/ or /nyuz/? Americans use the first pronunciation;
British use the second.

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In the United States, southerners distinguish between you (singular) and y’all (plural). People in other parts
of the country use you for both singular and plural. So a southerner greeting several people at once would
say It’s nice to see y’all. How are y’all doing? This is Morphological Variation

African American English varies from one region of the country to another, from one social status to another,
and from one generation to another.

The characteristics of African American English (AAE) have often been misunderstood as incorrect, sloppy
English. The speakers of AAE have often been stigmatized as uneducated and lazy. To avoid these negative
stereotypes, many African Americans have learned to use SAE while conducting business or working in the
white community. However, they use AAE in the African American community as a sign of ethnic pride and
neighborhood solidarity. This practice of changing from one style of language to another is called code
switching.

The English spoken by Americans of Hispanic descent displays a lot of variation; just as there are many
varieties of AAE, there are many varieties of Hispanic English (HE). Some of the characteristics of the English
spoken by immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries are the result of the application of the Spanish
phonological system on the English words and Spanish word order on English sentences.

In business, education, the professions, and the media, second- and third-generation Hispanic Americans are
communicating in both English and Spanish. They code switch from one language to the other, sometimes
even within the same sentence. A bank officer can conduct a conversation entirely in Spanish, except for the
affirmative response OK and conversation-ending bye-bye. A television announcer speaks unaccented
English, but pronounces Spanish personal names and place names in unaccented Spanish. Double negation
is commonly heard in the informal conversation of Hispanic English speakers who are not immigrants, but
second- and third generation Hispanic Americans. Another interesting morphological practice of the bilingual
Hispanic American community is the use of Spanish inflectional morphemes with English verbs. So you can
hear such words as watchale and parquiar. Pride in Spanish language heritage is encouraging people to
ensure that their children speak, read, and write Spanish. Assimilation into the English community means
that they use English too, even as part of a Spanish conversation. This code switching between two languages
reinforces their identity as members of the bilingual community.

The linguistic relativity hypothesis argues that the language someone speaks affects how she perceives the
world. There are two versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. The weak version, called linguistic
relativity, simply claims that language affects thought. The strong version, called linguistic determinism,
claims that language determines thought; speakers of a language can think of things only in the way that
their language expresses them.

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In the early twentieth century, linguistic theorists Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Whorf (1897–
1941) proposed that people of different cultures think and behave differently because the languages that
they speak require them to do so. In other words, the way in which individuals view the world around them
is affected by the language that they have learned to use to interpret their world. This has become known as
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although the two men did not work together on it.

Other linguists have criticized the hypothesis proposed by Sapir and Whorf because it claims that no one is
free to describe the world in a neutral way; we are “compelled” to read certain features into the world. This
is maybe why some have suggested that the weaker theory might reflect more accurately the role of
language; it influences thought, but people have tools for expressing all ideas, whether common in their
culture or not. Some concepts may indeed be easier or more commonly said in a particular language. But if
speakers of another language want to say that same thing, words can be borrowed. English speakers having
no direct equivalent for the Spanish concept of hyper-masculinity have borrowed the word macho.

Just as people are not confined to one language, but can shift from one language to another, we are not
confined to thinking in just the way our native language has compelled us.

Many studies have sought to test the nonlinguistic reasoning of speakers of different languages. Overall it is
difficult to draw firm conclusions because there is conflicting evidence.

Language Acquisition
Much of the recent research regarding first-language acquisition has focused on brain development. Many
linguists believe that the potential for language is innate to humans, that children are born with their brains
hardwired for ability to learn language. This innateness hypothesis states that they are predisposed to a
certain universal grammar (UG) involving phonemic differences, word order, and phrase recognition. This
hardwiring in the brain has been called a language acquisition device and it seems to work only during
childhood, according to the critical period hypothesis. It works despite poverty of the stimulus.

Other proposals concerning language acquisition include the imitation hypothesis, the reinforcement
hypothesis, the interactionist hypothesis (constructivism) and cognitive functionalism.

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Children seem to use their innate language abilities to extract the rules of the language. Within a few months
after birth, babies begin cooing and then babbling. Around one year of age, children begin saying one-word
utterances, which are referred to as holophrases; this stage of language acquisition is the holophrastic stage.
Sometime after eighteen months of age, children enter the two-word stage, in which they combine such
words as agent-action, action-object, possessor-possession, and action-location. As children begin adding
more words, their utterances are described as telegraphic speech. As they begin to learn the rules of
morphology, they acquire the plural marker, which they overgeneralize.

As early as six months of age, babies indicate that they understand the meaning of words by looking at the
object or person mentioned. By the age of six, their productive vocabulary will be about 14,000 words. Their
receptive vocabulary is considerably larger. Children overextend the meanings of words; they may also
underextend them. All adult words encompass a range of meanings; the child’s task in learning semantics is
to learn the range of meanings that adults assign to each word. Language acquisition continues well into the
school years. Children are socialized into their society through the use of language according to the beliefs
and ideas of the culture.

Deaf children of deaf parents acquire sign language in much the same way as children learning spoken
language, going through the same stages; hearing children of deaf parents learn both the sign language of
their parents and the spoken language of the community around them. First they babble, both orally and
manually. Then they make single signs with predictable errors, comparable to the hearing child’s errors in
pronunciation.

Children acquire more than one language as a result of either simultaneous bilingualism, where the child
acquires two (or more) languages from birth, or sequential bilingualism, where the child acquires a second
language after having begun to acquire a first language. There are two main hypotheses that propose how
children acquire and process two or more languages: the unitary system hypothesis and the separate systems
hypothesis.

Learning a language after the age of puberty is an intellectual process involving pronunciation practice,
grammar exercises, and vocabulary memorization. The second language is stored in a different part of the
brain than the first language. Much of the difficulty encountered in learning the second language is the result
of the fossilization of the first-language characteristics (phonological system, morphology, and syntax) in the
second language to produce pronunciation and grammatical errors.

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• Bibliografía (usar APA 7ª edición)

eds. Dawson, H. & Phelan, M. (2016) Language files: Materials for an introduction to language. The Ohio
State University, The Ohio State University Press, Columbus

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2017). An Introduction to Language. 11th ed. Cengage Learning,
Boston.

Rowe, B. M., & Levine, D. P. (2018). A concise introduction to linguistics. Routledge.