Quick questions on Contexts and causes of language change: what drives it - OCR A-Level English Language

A handful of forces drive most change, and naming them is the AO2-and-AO3 foundation.

Questions that name one cause ("technology is the most important driver") require judgement. A strong answer analyses the named cause but weighs it against the others, recognising that change usually has multiple, interacting causes and that some processes (standardisation) operate over centuries while others (internet abbreviation) are recent. Reaching a weighed judgement, rather than attributing everything to one cause, is the AO2 prize.

"The earlier text's variable spelling (the same word spelled differently within a page) and its heavy, comma-spliced punctuation are not errors but features of a pre-standard era: the text predates the full standardising influence of print, dictionaries and prescriptive grammars, which had not yet fixed spelling and punctuation. Tied to this context, the differences from the present-day text's regularised orthography track the long process of standardisation, explaining the change rather than merely noting it." This ties features to the cause and the trajectory.

"Technology clearly drives some of the recent text's features, the abbreviations, the new compounds for digital concepts, the speech-like informality, but it is not the sole cause: social change has altered the register considered acceptable in public writing, and contact continues to bring borrowings. Weighed across the data, technology is a major but not exclusive driver, accelerating change rather than solely causing it, which is the judgement the evidence supports." This weighs the causes critically.

How did printing drive language change? [2 marks]

Why is single-cause thinking a weakness in explaining change? [2 marks]

Evaluate the view that technology is the most important driver of recent language change, with reference to the data. [18 marks]