Language Variation and Description PDF

Language Variation and Description 2 — When you encounter a variety (dialect) of your native language that is different from your own, you might think speakers of this other variety don’t know how to speak grammatically. — But every natural language (and every dialect of every language) has its O...

Language Variation and Description 2 — When you encounter a variety (dialect) of your native language that is different from your own, you might think speakers of this other variety don’t know how to speak grammatically. — But every natural language (and every dialect of every language) has its OWN consistent set of building blocks and rules that its speakers share. ¡ And if you have trouble understanding another variety, it is likely because your variety has different rules/building blocks Language Variation and Description 3 — Social factors (not linguistic ones) make some dialects “standard” and others non-standard. ¡ For example, some dialects might be associated with wealthy areas/regions — And if you start investigating that different dialect as a descriptive grammarian, you can begin to understand the rules of that dialect. Language Variation and Description 4 — We will do an exercise that illustrates what we can learn as descriptive grammarians with a nonstandard variety of English. — This exercise will give you some initial practice with working with a data set (one of the goals of this course).