Prior to taking English 370, I had never studied the English language in the way of linguistics. With this being said, I had little knowledge of how the language works and how I speak the language personally. Before this class and as a native speaker of the English language and growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I believed I spoke perfect American English with no accent. By taking this course, I learned many things about the language, but also myself of a speaker of it. Now I know that people in the Pacific Northwest do in fact have an accent, most noticeably with the pronunciation of “caught” and “cot” which sound the same to my ears, and there is no such thing as perfect English. Throughout the course, I learned exactly how I speak English through the course studies of phonology, morphology, and stylistics. In the course section in the study of phonology, I learned many new things on how the English language is spoken. Firstly, in phonemics, the study of how words sound, and how the sounds are made. Secondly, in phonetics, how words are actually spoken. I hadn’t realized how different words and phrases were pronounced when actually spoken. By completing phonetic transcriptions, I learned just different speech actually is spoken than how we perceive speech phonemically. For example, when I say “want to go,” I hadn’t recognized that I actually say “wanna go.” But when I pay closer attention to my speech, I can definitely hear the difference. Another example is constant cluster reduction, in which where a constant in a series of word final words is deleted. For instance, when I say “iced tea,” it sounds like “ice tea,” because of this rule. And if I actually pronounced the last constant it would sound odd. This knowledge is important because both native speakers and non-native speakers use this rule. Through the study of phonology, it made me fully comprehend how I speak the English language as an individual. By studying morphology, it was challenging but also very interesting to see the roots of words to fully understand the meaning of them. It also pointed out the difficulty of English grammar rules. Also, by further studying the passive forms of sentences, I understood this further which will help me in the future because I tend to overuse passive sentences in my writing. Now I realize that although it is wordier it can detract from an argument because it is not as forceful. Although diagramming sentences turned out more difficult than I expected, it is also a valuable skill to see what exactly sentences are made up of. By furthering understanding this concept, it will improve my own writing because I will have a greater awareness of what goes into my writing, and be able to distinguish between what works …show more content…
It also answered questions I had about how and why different accents are developed. For instance, British English sounds different because of the different stress patterns. For me, by being an American English speaker raised in the Pacific Northwest, my personal idiolect is Northwest English, which takes words from Canadian English and California English. For example, merry, Mary, and marry are pronounced the same in this dialect; as are the words pen and pin. Vocabulary words distant from this region include sunbreak, spendy, cougar, and black ice. In addition to the Northwest dialect, I also have several different specialized lexicons that are unique to my personal idiolect. These include several that are most likely similar for other students, like literary talk and UW talk. Most students in this class would know about metaphors, symbolism, poetic meters, and the Hub. Some others of mine include computer talk, photography talk, and horse talk. The latter is so expansive that when I talk to people who don’t know anything about horses, presents a challenge for me to explain it in simpler terms. If I started talking to someone in the class about “being on the bit” or “getting a good distance” they would have no clue what I was talking about. Conversationally, I have different registers too. I would talk differently to a professor than a close friend. With someone of stature I would use more professional and polite talk. With a friend, I would pay less attention to my speech because I wouldn’t need to focus on impressing