Week 13

Lexical resource in context

• Vocabulary development
• Diction - author's word choice
• Connotation and denotation

Vocabulary development is a process by which people acquire words. Babbling shifts towards meaningful speech as infants grow and produce their first words around the age of one year. In early word learning, infants build their vocabulary slowly. By the age of 18 months, infants can typically produce about 50 words and begin to make word combinations.

In order to build their vocabularies, infants must learn about the meanings that words carry. The mapping problem asks how infants correctly learn to attach words to referents. Constraints theories, domain-general views, social-pragmatic accounts, and an emergentistcoalition model have been proposed to account for the mapping problem.

From an early age, infants use language to communicate. Caregivers and other family members use language to teach children how to act in society. In their interactions with peers, children have the opportunity to learn about unique conversational roles. Through pragmatic directions, adults often offer children cues for understanding the meaning of words.

Throughout their school years, children continue to build their vocabulary. In particular, children begin to learn abstract words. Beginning around age 3–5, word learning takes place both in conversation and through reading. Word learning often involves physical context, builds on prior knowledge, takes place in social context, and includes semantic support. The phonological loop and serial order short-term memory may both play an important role in vocabulary development.

Diction (/ˈdɪkʃᵊn/; Latin: dictionem (nom. dictio), "a saying, expression, word"^[1]) in its original, primary meaning, refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabularychoices and style of expression in a poem or story.^[2][3] A secondary, common meaning of "diction" means the distinctiveness of speech,^[3][4][5] the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This secondary sense is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation, or with its synonymarticulation.^[6]

Diction has multiple concerns; register—words being either formal or informal in social context—is foremost. Literary diction analysis reveals how a passage establishes tone and characterization, e.g. a preponderance of verbs relating physical movement suggests an active character, while a preponderance of verbs relating states of mind portrays an introspective character. Diction also has an impact upon word choice and syntax.

Diction comprises eight elements: Phoneme, Syllable, Conjunction, Connective, Noun, Verb, Inflection, and Utterance.

The relationship between words and meanings is extremely complicated, and belongs to the field of semantics. For now, though, what you need to know is that words do not have single, simple meanings. Traditionally, grammarians have referred to the meanings of words in two parts:

denotation

a literal meaning of the word

connotation

an association (emotional or otherwise) which the word evokes

For example, both "woman" and "chick" have the denotation "adult female" in North American society, but "chick" has somewhat negative connotations, while "woman" is neutral.

For another example of connotations, consider the following:

negative

There are over 2,000 vagrants in the city.

neutral

There are over 2,000 people with no fixed address in the city.

positive

There are over 2,000 homeless in the city.

All three of these expressions refer to exactly the same people, but they will invoke different associations in the reader's mind: a "vagrant" is a public nuisance while a "homeless" person is a worthy object of pity and charity. Presumably, someone writing an editorial in support of a new shelter would use the positive form, while someone writing an editorial in support of anti-loitering laws would use the negative form.

In this case, the dry legal expression "with no fixed address" quite deliberately avoids most of the positive or negative associations of the other two terms -- a legal specialist will try to avoid connotative language altogether when writing legislation, often resorting to archaic Latin or French terms which are not a part of ordinary spoken English, and thus, relatively free of strong emotional associations.

Many of the most obvious changes in the English language over the past few decades have had to do with the connotations of words which refer to groups of people. Since the 1950's, words like "Negro" and "crippled" have acquired strong negative connotations, and have been replaced either by words with neutral connotations (ie "black," "handicapped") or by words with deliberately positive connotations (ie "African-Canadian," "differently-abled").