Sentence stems with celebrity endorsement movie quotes in the language user's lexicon

Abstract

This contribution focuses on ways in which popular culture affects our everyday language use. The main purpose of the present analysis is to suggest that film and mass media have created special conditions for language learning and use that were quite inconceivable before. One change brought about by current technology is rather banal: it has made it possible to reach unprecedentedly vast numbers of people. Apart from this obvious fact, modern popular culture has created special contexts through which language users come across some common expressions. This has implications for how such expressions are then stored in people's lexical memories. Under current linguistic theorizing, people's memories are assumed to be roughly equivalent in the sense that one person's definition of a word can be expected to overlap with other people's definitions. However, the overlap is not perfect, given that one person's knowledge is derived from his or her private experiences and these are different for different people. On the other hand, expressions associated with popular movies are presented in ways that are identical to all audiences.

Keywords

• formulaic language
• sentence stems
• mass media
• language acquisition