Key theorists: Social class
- 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
- British sociologist who looked at person/position oriented families
- 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
- Bernstein
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