The course I will be teaching you isSociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics.

ENG553

My name is Dr. Zahara BukhariI am a double PhD in literature and linguistics/business

administration from Indiana university, Bloomington, Indiana, USA.

I am currently working at COMSATS University, Islamabad Campus.

Sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics

• Various branches on the basis of the inner world of man’s mind and of the outer world of society and social relationships have developed recently in modern linguistics, such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

• We shall study these branches in detail.

Definitions

• Linguistics:– It is the branch of science that studies the origin,

structure, and use of language.• Sociolinguistics:

- The study of relationships between language and social behavior is called sociolinguistics.

• Psycholinguistics: – The psychological study of language is called

psycholinguistics. As the name implies psycholinguistics is principally an integration of the fields of psychology and linguistics.

Introduction to Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics– It is the study of language in relation to society.

Language is always meant for society. The social interaction and communication of ideas or messages can be possible only through language.

• The history and the function of language have been the subject of studies since the prehistoric period, but sociolinguistics has been introduced only recently perhaps in the late sixties. Considerable growth has taken place since then.

Sociolinguistics

• It does not mean that the study of language in relation to society is the invention of 1960s but on the contrary there is a long tradition of dialects and in the general study of the relations between word meaning and culture.

• since the 1960s both these began to be considered as the subjects within sociolinguistics.

• Sociolinguistics throws light on both the nature of language and the nature of society.

• The purpose of language is to represent the nature and the culture of the society.

SociolinguisticsForms of language

• We use different forms of language for different purposes. We express languages through either speech or graphic medium.

• The speech can be a bit different from the graphic expression.

• The grammatical rules and the selection of appropriate words are required in graphic expression but in speech some relaxation may be allowed.

Sociolinguistics

• In graphic expression there are number of formal and informal forms to meet the different methods of social interaction. e.g. letter, application, report, notice, agenda, proceedings, statement, newspapers, books , etc.

• The speech may also have a number of forms e.g., gossip, talk, lecture in a public place, lecture in a seminar or in classroom etc.

Insights into sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics is the study of the any and all aspects of society including cultural norms, expectations and context ,on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society.

• Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language while the latter’s focus is language’s effect on society.

Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned recently.

• It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables e.g. ethnicity,religion,status,gender,level of education,age,etc. and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in socio or socioeconomic classes.

Sociolinguistics• As the usage of language varies from place to place

(dialect) , language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistic studies.

• The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguistics in the 1930s , and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s ,but none received much attention in the west until much later.

• The study of the social motivation of language change, on the other hand has its foundation in the wave model of the late 19th century.

Sociolinguistics

• The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of a 1939 paper.

• Sociolinguistics in the west first appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.

Factors Influencing Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics is a quickly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the individual and social variation of language.

• Just as regional variation of language can give a lot of information about the place the speaker is from, social variation tells about the role fulfilled by a given speaker within one community, or country.

• Sociolinguistics is practical scientific discipline researching the language that is actually used either by native speakers or foreigners, in order to formulate theories about language change.

Sociolinguistics

There are numerous factors influencing the way people speak which are investigated by sociolinguistics.

• Social class: the position of the speaker in the society, measured by the level of education , parental background, profession and their effect on syntax and lexis used by the speaker.

• Social context: the register of the language used depending on changing situations, formal language in formal meetings and informal during meetings with friends for example.

Sociolinguistics

• Geographical origins: slight differences in pronunciation between speakers that point at the geographical region which the speaker comes from.

• Ethnicity: differences between the use of a given language by its native speakers and other ethnic groups.

• Nationality: clearly visible in the case of the English language British English differs from American English, or Canadian English.

Sociolinguistics

• Gender: differences in patterns of language use between men and women, such as quantity of speech, intonation patterns.

• Age: the influence of age of the speaker on the use of vocabulary and grammar complexity.

Sociolinguistics

• An important factor influencing the way of formulating sentences is according to sociolinguists the social class of the speakers.

• There has been a division of social classes proposed in order to make the description accurate.

• Two main groups of language users, mainly those performing non-manual work and those with more years of education are the ‘middle class’.

• Those who perform some kind of manual work are ‘working class’.

Sociolinguistics

• Additional terms ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ are frequently used in order to subdivide the social classes.

• Therefore, differences between upper middle class can be compared with lower working class.

Sociolinguistics

• It is notable that people are acutely aware of the differences in speech patterns that mark their social class and are often able to adjust their style to the interlocutor.

• It is especially true for the members of the middle class who seem eager to use forms associated with upper class, however , in such efforts the forms of characteristic of upper class are often overused by the middle class members.

Sociolinguistics

• The above mentioned process of adopting own speech to reduce social distance is called convergence.

• When people want to emphasize the social distance they make use of this process called divergence purposefully using idiosyncratic forms.

Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics investigates the way in which language changes depending on the region of country it is used in.

• To describe a variety of language that differs in grammar , lexis and pronunciation from others a term dialect is used.

• Each member of community has a unique way of speaking due to the life experience , education , age, and aspiration. An individual personal variation of language use is called an idiolect.

Sociolinguistics

• There are numerous factors influencing idiolect some of which have been discussed just now, yet two more need to be elucidated, namely Jargon and Slang.

• Jargon is specific technical vocabulary associated with the particular field of interest, or topic. For example words such as convergence , dialect and social class are sociolinguistic jargon.

• Slang is a type of language used most frequently by people from outside of high status groups characterized by the use of unusual words and phrases instead of conventional forms.

Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics which studies the relation between language and society.

• Language changes its form and structure on the basis of social conditions, for example, social class, gender, religion and culture groups.

• A particular social group may speak a different variety of a language from the rest of the community. Such a group of speakers comes under the head “speech community”.

Sociolinguistics

• The variation in language, as such, may occur due to differences in class or status.

• The speakers belonging to the educated and higher class may have a different way of speaking of the same language in comparison with that of those belonging to the uneducated and lower class.

• A language also varies among the speakers belonging to different geographical regions with respect to their pronunciations. For example, the English spoken in London varies from that which is spoken in the other regions of the same country.

Sociolinguistics• For example, Received Pronunciation (RP) is a variety of spoken English

used in the south-west of England and is particularly associated with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the BBC.

• It is an educated and formal kind of English. Where as the English spoken in the north of England, for example, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, in Scotland and Wales differ in their form and pronunciation.

• Similarly, varieties of English spoken in different countries, for example, American, Indian and Australian English, also have variations.

• Sociolinguistics studies these variations and changes in a language.

Introduction toPsycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological processes involved in the language.

• Psycholinguists study understanding, producing and remembering language and hence are concerned with listening, reading , speaking, writing and memory of language.

• They are also interested in how we acquire language and the way in which it interacts with other psychological systems.

• Many people think that psycholinguistics has a rather dated field emphasizing the role of linguistics too much. Although the area might once have been about the psychology of linguistic theory, it is now much more. Still there is currently no better term so it will have to do.

Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire ,use ,comprehend and produce language.

• Modern research makes use of biology , neuro science , cognitive science, linguistics, and information theory to study how the brain processes language.

• Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structure, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, texts, etc.

• Developmental psycholinguistics studies children ability to learn language.

Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistic is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. It is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the language examines the processes that occur in the brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse.

• It is interested in the ways of storing lexical items and syntactic rules in the mind, as well as the processes of memory involved in perception and interpretation of texts.

Psycholinguistics

• The processes of speaking and listening are analyzed, along with the language acquisition and language disorders.

• Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of Chomsky revolution.

• The ideas presented by Chomsky became so important that they quickly gained a lot of publicity and had a big impact on a large number of contemporary views of language.

• Consequently also psycholinguistics started investigating such matters as the processing of deep and surface structure of sentences.

Psycholinguistics

• In the early years of development of psycholinguistics special experiments were designed in order to examine if the focus of processing is the deep syntactic structure.

• On the basis of transformation of sentences it was initially discovered that the ease of processing was connected with syntactic complexity. However, later on it became clear that not only syntactic complexity adds to the difficulty of processing, but also semantic factors have a strong influence on it.