WRIT 1700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Standard Written English, National Language, Elizabethan Era
Document Summary
Week 17 - social discourse and genre games. Recall foster wallace explaining that we don"t get to have personal languages. Words and usage rules are conventional - they follow conventions . They are also arbitrary, as you will recall from rst lectures: there is nothing in the word cat that is naturally connected to the actual creature. Discourse - larger units within a national language - discourse is social, arbitrary, conventional. Temporal period (eg. in english, middle ages to 19th century to 21st century - different uses of language in different time periods) Age (language is used differently at different stages of life - children vs. adult, slang in generations) Class (poorer classes use language differently from middle and upper classes - not just about using language correctly in terms of grammar, but actual diction choice - how pro cient different classes are in terms of standard written english)
