Past Exam answer June 2013

QUESTION 3

Text E is an extract from a newspaper account of the testimony of Captain Thomas Preston, Commander of the British troops in Boston, America. In 1770, he was tried for murder following a massacre of local people.

Referring in detail to the text and to relevant ideas from language study, explore how language has changed over time.

JUNE 2013

  

Plan:

The ‘s’ used in this transcript are written differently to modern s’s used in text. This is a bit confusing as it looks like a F. In old scripture writers used their own way of writing, there was no standardisation of English. A writer from a different town could phonetically write something different to another writer in a town only a few miles away.

Many words have no spacing between them; this could have been the fault of the newspaper writer.

Grammar – written in past tense, irregular adverbials ‘beat’ used. Sentence types with compound and complex and use of declaratives.

Lexis – military lexis ‘destroyed’ ‘horrid’ ‘repairing’ etc Use of obsolete words, LFL (Low Frequency Lexis) this ages the text, language is ever changing and words come and go and adapt over time, for example the popularity of acronyms have only come about due to technology – archaic lexis ‘nay’ and ‘parlay’ as well as taboo lexis like god damn, in transcript is dashed out g-d damn

The discourse is direct and reported speech, as well as being chronological. Speaker tone is humble, clear and justified.

Answer

This transcript is a court ruling of a soldier on trial for the murder of townsfolk; this is the testimony of his trial. It is clear to see that Captain Thomas Preston (the soldier in mention) is a well-respected man and humble in his intentions, not putting the blame on anyone and admits he could’ve potentially, unintentionally started the shootings. This newspaper is reported in both direct speech and reported speech. Highlighting his men more favourably and denoting the ‘mob’. The genre conventions are followed for both a court ruling and that of a newspaper.

The transcript features many different sentence structure from compound to complex, the more complex sentences are joined together primarily by semi-colons and the non-standard but. This shows the Captain is an educated man. This makes me think the captain has come from a rich background is perhaps old in his mid-40’s. He uses declaratives like ‘immediately’ ‘instantly’ and ‘were’ which gives him power over the situation, it shows that he has authority and is justified in his actions and that of his men.

Some of the orthographical aspects of this text are outdated; an example of this would be the long S, which can easily be mistaken for an ‘f’. This at the time contextually would’ve been the norm among writers. There are is a wide range of punctuation throughout this text, examples of this would be the dashes which show omission and speech marks to show direct speech.

It is clear to see from this text how much language has changed, but there are obvious similarities like the syntax structure and the punctuation. What changes the most are the words and how their used. Words that once meant one thing now mean a complete other for example the ‘gay’ before the 50’s generally meant happy or to be glad; now it means something completely different now being used a s a word to label homosexuals. And other words have simply been dropped or are still used but not as often. These words are labelled as LFC (Low Frequency Lexis) and would most likely be found in story books and not in modern conversation.

This newspaper extract is an early example of the standardisation of the English language and the start of the modern printing press. S.E. or Standard English is a term used to describe the proper English uses so that any English speaker can understand. The print press made in the 1800’s by John Sherwin, with this he was able to mass produce text on a scale that had never been seen before. This is also what really boosted the idea of a Standard English.

With the advances in technology have really influenced how we use language as a society. The first of many was texting on mobile phones, at first there was a letter limit which meant people had to remove vowels from words and abbreviate to fit in their message; words like lol (laugh out loud) became popular so much so they were added to the oxford dictionary; so these words naturally transcended text and are now used in speech. Descriptive approach to language is the acceptance of words like ‘lol’ in our language and the prescriptive approach to language is the opposite and they believe that words like ‘lol’ shouldn’t be classed as proper words.

Constantly through the text the only gender to be mentioned were males, even if there was a women either as a part of the ‘mob’ or the soldiers, they would still put under an umbrella term; the captain refers to the guards as ‘the men’ implying that are all male.