Language Change Past Paper

Quick Attempt (to be continued)

January 2013 AQA Paper Language Change Question 

Text D - Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain 1942 produced by the US War Department and given to all American Servicemen being sent to Britain during the Second World War 

Text E – the beginning of an article from the Daily Mail’s website, published in 2011. 

Prescriptivist views are visible within both texts but to differing degrees, influenced by their purpose; text D, though we often expect older texts to be prescriptive appears to show more awareness of descriptive attitudes. For example, ‘or will be apparently wrongly used’ the core of this is a prescriptivist view deeming the English words inferior to the Americanisms but the use of the adverb ‘apparently’ suggests an awareness of other views and undermines the declarative phrase. This could be because they are encouraging their troops to integrate with British troops and therefore not judge them, we are aware that the Americans introduced ‘the draft’ and 50 million men registered. These men would’ve had very limited training and the instructions were there to ease their worries and paint it as an adventure, for so many men that would’ve never left their state prewar let alone the country. Whereas, text E is a prescriptivist article titled ‘How is your English? Research shows Americanisms AREN’T taking over the British language’. The rhetorical question seem to imply prescriptivism seeming like a closed question, it is either good (presuming this to be the Queen’s English) or bad (influenced by Americanisms, possibly code switching and non-standard utterances). The capitalisation of ‘aren’t’ connotes surprise, as if the audience were meant to have thought otherwise until reading this article. Text E uses the extended metaphor of a competition between American and British language with words such as ‘taking over’, ‘against’, ‘rival’, ‘clash’ and many more. The article seems to conclude that British is winning and we do not need to fear American invasion of our language. All imposing prescriptivist views.