15.1 Text Analysis

    Text A, an excerpt from Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford: In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew by Edward Berens, was written in 1832, which means it is written in late modern English. Over time, English has had quite a few significant changes that are theorized and studied by people all over the world. One of those theories that closely relates to the change we see in Text A is the cultural transmission theory. Developed by many, the cultural transmission theory suggests that the passing on of information through one another occurs through the actions and imitations of the language/idea that the teacher would like to put forward. Through this learning of new information by socialized and engaged interactions, you are cultural learning. For instance, Text A is all about the advice that an uncle is giving to his nephew who’s going to Oxford. This downward communication of an uncle talking to his nephew and giving advice is the base of the cultural transmission theory. Through the advice and wordage that the uncle used, the nephew will likely pick up on and continue to imitate. This imitation, although probably linguistic, will also be imitated in nature as the advice would suggest.

    When considering the change that language has gone through, an important aspect to see change is through the syntax of the author’s writing. At the beginning of the second paragraph where the author states, “Take care that you are never guilty of such a violation of good taste and correct judgment.” This order of wording more specifically when writing “Take care that…” Isn’t commonly understood since the phrase take care in present-day English would be what you would end a conversation with, not to start one. Syntactic change is a more common phenomenon that happens more frequently throughout random changes. A theory that further outlines this is the random fluctuation theory which suggests that language changes happen in a more random way, through the users of the language of course, but also through the received pronunciation and spread of misspelled or misspoken words being seen as common when first introduced to a learner. This makes odd syntactical changes that aren’t exactly “wrong English” more explicable.
    Text B, a collocate chart that represents adjectives only for “taste” and “judgment” from the British National Corpus from 1980 to 1993, shows significant changes in the collocates as written in Text A. It is most notably changed in the juxtaposition of the collocates when reading “...such a violation of good taste and correct judgment.” Where one might fit into this more recent chart in saying “good taste,” “correct judgment” doesn’t make an appearance on this collocate chart. This would further the peculiarities of random fluctuations theory as two different words with two different meanings each with its own list of collocates change differently despite both being compared on the same timeline.

    Text C, an n-gram graph for the phrases “are apt to be”, “are likely to be” and “tend to be” taken from a timeline of 1800 to 2008 shows higher increases in both “tend to be”, and “are likely to be”, as “are apt to be” dies out even though it was never really used even in earlier times. This hints back towards Text A once again in the author's writing of “...young men are apt to be guilty.” This change of lexis would bring the theory of lexical gaps to light. The theory of lexical gaps suggests that patterns in speech make mistakes in speech eventually in usable language. For example, in the spread of language, “apt to be” might have been mistaken for “ought to be.” This change in language could have been from dialects or just general miscommunication that was spread like a bad game of telephone. The change and shortening of the phrase is also explicable with the ideas of the infectious disease assumption which is that the uses of shorter and smaller words change from how lazy populations become, which make sense if we count the syllables in the phrases selected with the most popular phrase being the shortest of the three.