OCR A-Level English Language: language and social groups overview quiz quiz

Deficit, dominance, difference, diversity

Nativism, behaviourism, cognitivism, interactionism

Overt, covert, instrumental, influential

Accent, dialect, sociolect, idiolect

That women, unlike men, simply never use tag questions, hedges or other tentative features in any spoken context at all

That men and women speak in completely identical ways once their differing social roles are properly accounted for

That gendered language is performed and context-dependent, with power and situation explaining more than gender

That only Lakoff's deficit model was ever correct and every later gender researcher was entirely mistaken

That women's language is inherently superior to men's and should be treated as the prestige norm in all settings

That men interrupt far more often than women in mixed-sex talk because they consciously seek to dominate the floor

That language ability is entirely innate and so cannot be shaped by a speaker's gender or social environment

That 'women's language' is tentative (hedges, tag questions, empty adjectives), framed as a deficit

The hidden status of non-standard forms within a group, signalling solidarity and authenticity

The open, widely recognised prestige that Received Pronunciation carries across British society as a whole

A strict grammatical rule that speakers must follow if their usage is to count as fully standard English

The high status that formal written English holds over casual, spontaneous spoken varieties of the language

That a speaker's accent carries no social meaning at all and tells a listener nothing about their background

That pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ correlated with class and prestige, and shifted in careful speech

That all speakers in the study were entirely identical in pronunciation regardless of where they worked

That a person's dialect is genetically inherited from their parents rather than learned from their community

They are exactly the same thing and the two terms can be used interchangeably

Accent applies only to written language, whereas dialect applies only to spoken language

Accent is pronunciation; dialect is grammar and lexis

Accent is always regional in scope, whereas dialect is always national in scope

That some accents are genuinely linguistically superior to others and so deserve their higher prestige

That accents never vary at all between speakers from different regions or social classes within a country

That dialect is unimportant and has no measurable effect on how a listener judges a speaker's character

That the same speaker is judged differently by accent, showing attitudes are social, not linguistic

Convergence towards, or divergence from, an interlocutor's variety

The fixed spelling rules that govern when a final consonant is doubled before a suffix

The ordered stages a child passes through while acquiring its first spoken language

The four main sentence types, namely simple, compound, complex and compound-complex

They are identical terms describing exactly the same kind of power, with no real distinction between them

Instrumental power is held by role or authority; influential power is exercised through persuasion

Instrumental power is found only in written texts, while influential power is found only in spoken talk

Instrumental power is always weaker than influential power and rarely shapes how people actually behave

A type of artificial synthetic fabric, mentioned here only as a loose and misleading metaphor for manufactured language

A grammatical inflection added to a word to mark its tense, number, person or possession

Institutions and media simulating a personal relationship with a mass audience through inclusive address

A recognised stage in the development of a child's spelling on the way to conventional orthography

It is far too kind and generous to speakers who really are simply being careless with their language

It is explicitly forbidden by the OCR specification, which is the only reason candidates should avoid it

Non-standard language does not actually exist, since every variety is really just standard English in disguise

It is descriptively false; variation is systematic and meaningful, and analysis should read its function

Power is negotiated; the less powerful may resist, so reading both shows power is contested, not simply imposed

Resistance is completely irrelevant to discourse, since power in talk only ever flows one way from the top down

Only the most powerful speaker in any interaction matters, so the responses of the less powerful can be ignored

Resistance is against the unwritten rules of polite conversation, so analysing it would lose a candidate marks