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.