Self Analysis

From my transcripts I found that I was the less confident speaker. I don't feel this reflects my  normal speaking habits, however I was in a different environment and this could've affected the way in which I spoke. I found that I interrupted the most and Ellie took more time per turn. I also used fillers such as "umm" a lot more than the other speaker. I felt I back channeled with a lot of what Ellie was saying which would show I am a co operative speaker.

Word of Mouth - Michael Rosen

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06z2pmp

This radio show by Michael Rosen is about the most common words used in the English language nowadays.

With Dr Laura Wright, a linguist at Cambridge University, they speak about the topic. It is suggested the most common words used are - the, be, to, of, and, with, I, you and have. There are no nouns, and few verbs. 

Jonathan Culpepper from University of Lancaster joins and it is shown that we don't realise that we say the most commonly used words, because it is programmed in our brains so much that we don't have to think about it any more. Another important point discussed is that the inbuilt sexism of language is shown with the word counts of lexis in English. 'He' is the 16th most commonly used, 'His' is 23rd and 'She' is 30th in the list. This underlines the fact that sexism is  present in the language we use. 

A point discussed is that we have grammatical words and content words in our language. Grammatical words are the small and useful words which act as a glue to how we form sentences. However content words are the ones which have meanings. They talk about the fact that 'Google' won't even pay attention to the grammatical words, just the content words.

Jonathan says the most popular grammatical words were 'I', 'me' and 'my' whereas the content words were 'love', 'make', 'baby', 'alone', 'rain' and 'sad'. This suggests the artists speak a lot about romance. 

Finally they talk about how technology allows us to make words frequency lists. The expanding world means that we can make statistical comparisons between the language used for different purposes.