How idiolect changes through an individual's life

Páginas: 18 (4369 palabras) Publicado: 2 de noviembre de 2011
Introduction
Since many years, there have been too many researches about language in a lot of different ways and categories as its acquisition, function, differences, etc. But just few linguists have studied language in its very simple way: the language of an individual. All of us have our own way to communicate with others; it means that each individual has a different style than theothers at the moment to express their ideas or feelings. This individual pattern of language is called idiolect.
This lack of studies made a little bit difficult to do this work, in which we are going to see this part of language that we listen and produce everyday in all our life and that we almost never pay it attention, that is why it was decided to use the work of some authors and combinedthem.
This work is going to explain, first at all, what is this thing called idiolect and how the society with all its elements, the social class and we as members of a community affect it.
Then we are going to see how the pattern of language of a simple individual starts to change through his age and the main factors that produce these changes and why. The age was divided in threestages, the individual as a child, as a teenager and as an adult. The childhood carries since the born until the thirteen years old, the adolescence starts in thirteen years old until the nineteen years and the adult age is about the nineteen forward.
At the end we have a field research of which hypothesis was created from the investigation shown in this work, and the results of thatresearch that whether prove the hypothesis through surveys realized. It was decided to include some of the reactions of the polled people to give credibility. Besides, there is included an annexe with some surveys and another one with some graphics about them that are inclued in a CD-R annexed.

1. What is idiolect?
Idiolect, according to the Merriam’s Webster dictionary, is the language orspeech pattern of one individual at a particular period of life (616).
It could be in a very summarized way because there are more factors that can modify this “pattern” of language. One of them can be the social environment in which the individual lives or in which the individual is in a specific moment. For example, we do not talk as the same way when we talk with our friends as when wetalk in a job’s interview. Another is the social class, because is the way in which people speak what defines the social role and also, in many cases, the economic situation of the person who is speaking (Stubbs, 23).
So, we can say that an idiolect is the way in which one person speak by himself and that shows his or her own capabilities of language. The ways of speech or the idiolect of agroup of persons that live in the same community is called common languages. These common languages are not made of a single idiolect, but at the relation and fusion of the idiolects of all the people of the community. This is more explained by Noam Chomsky, who distinguishes two kinds of language: the E-language and the I-language. The E-language was about the grammatical rules, sounds and thestructure of the language in a functional way; and the I-language was a group of symbols and rules that generate an E-language (http://frege.brown.edu/heck/pdf/published/Idiolects.pdf).
We can suppose from here that an idiolect is the simplest form of the language that at the same time helps to generate it. In this chapter we are going to see deepest the factors that affect the idiolectof a person.
1.1 Idiolect and Society
Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is related to society and culture. According to this science “the internal differentiation of human societies is reflected in their languages. Different social groups use different linguistic varieties, and as experienced members of a speech community we have learnt to classify speakers accordingly”...
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