Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In countries like the United States, where citizens speak many different languages and come from a variety of national and ethnic groups, there is a "folk linguistic" belief that the most prestigious dialect is the single standard dialect of English that all people should speak. [14]
Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive text corpus that is written in the English language. In total, the texts in the Oxford English Corpus contain more than 2 ...
Also, a speaker must avoid using very many "strange words, compound words, and invented words". [13] Aristotle considered this kind of language an excessive departure from the way people normally speak. However, one acceptable departure from plain language is the use of metaphor because metaphors are used by all people in everyday conversation.
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal ...
In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. [1] An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their ...
Prominent English-language fantasy writers have rejected definitions of "magic realism" as something other than a synonym for fantasy fiction. Gene Wolfe said, "magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish", [66] and Terry Pratchett said magic realism "is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy". [67]
This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks. [1] The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it.
The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. [21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested [22] [23] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are ...