Key theorists: Social class

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  • Created by: E456
  • Created on: 28-11-17 13:48
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  • Key theorists: Social class
    • Bernstein
      • British sociologist who looked at person/position oriented families
        • position orientated (closed families): working class, personal and context bond
        • person orientated (open families): middle class, more personal and context free
      • form of language used by working class and middle class students explains their comparative performance at school
      • working class students use restricted code
        • short, simple sentences consisting of limited vocabulary
        • teachers speak in an elaborated code and this accounts for the poor performance of the working class in education
      • middle class students use elaborated code
        • complex sentences consisting of extended vocabulary
        • teacher's use of the elaborated code means that middle class children do well in education
    • Trudgill
      • more women in Norwich pronounced -ing
      • more people from the middle middle class pronounced -ing than from the lower class
      • investigated the use of the standard, prestige -ing form in Norwich (1974)
    • Cheshire
      • used long-term participant observation to gather data about the use of grammatical variables and adherence to peer group culture by boys and girls in Reading
      • boys use vernacular forms more frequently than girls do
      • 'gender itself was an influential explanatory factor accounting for different speech patterns which were observed'
      • 'particular linguistic forms may signal membership of the group 'men' or 'women, rather than indicating a speaker's class background or social aspirations
    • Labov
      • conducted an experiment to see which types of stores pronounced '4th floor' with the r's (Saks, Macys and Kleins)
      • Saks employees more careful in the way they spoke
      • upper-class more careful in their pronunciation
    • Milroy
      • used participant observation in order to study local practices  in interpreting socio-linguistic patterns
      • the strongest vernacular speakers were generally those who had the strongest neighbourhood network ties
      • the social network approach uncovers local social structures and links them to community-wide social and economic patterns
      • the strongest vernacular speakers are those with the highest level of integration into neighbourhood networks
    • Petyt
      • studied the usage of common linguists variables in many northern English accents and the omission of the initial /h/ in their speech (H-dropping)
      • 'the greater  regional accent use in the working class diminishes as you move up the social class scale'
      • 'when individuals may move up the social class scale, they would modify their speech a bit further towards RP swell as making less use of non-standard features like H-dropping'
      • speakers who moved up in the social scale made a conscious effort to change their pronunciation vowel sounds - hypercorrection

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