Tuesday, 14 June 2016

My findings from Mondays lesson - 14/06/16

Book title - The language report
Author - Susie Dent
Year the book was published - 2003
First edition
Published by - Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2003
Area/city published - New York
Pages - 160

"We should need new words. The old ones just wouldn't fit."

This quote from Susie Dent shows two statements I can test - firstly, the need, use and creation of new words, and secondly how the meanings of words changing, relating to how the old ones no longer 'fit'.

3 comments:

  1. You could test this by asking participants questions using old language and modern language to see if they respond by converging or diverging their language to suit the old or new language used in questioning

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  2. you could test the need, use and creation of new words by asking a range of people from different age groups if they think we need new words. You could show them a list of words which have had a modified word created which means the same the same thing such as whether they prefer 'reem' or 'cool'

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  3. Good suggestions. It would be interesting to see which words are coming into the dictionary that are newly coined and which are old words put to new uses (polysemes). Make sure you are collecting data you can use in terms of quantified findings and exploring the use of the language in context. That doesn't mean you need to use interviews or questionnaires (although you can); you could just research the uses of words that are evolving now (synchronic language change) - which lexical field of words could you focus on e.g. related to technology, rap, gender etc?

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