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Was America the Death of English?
Edwin Newman, 40 years later
Beth Rapp Young, Assoc. ProfessorUniversity of Central Florida, [email protected]
ATEG 28th Annual ConferenceAugust 11-12, 2017Central Michigan University
There is no reason for Americans to feel inferior to the British when it comes to language. The British are as intent on ruining theirs as we are on ruining ours.
Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking, p. 101
1. Choose a prescriptive rule to research. The rule must be controversial--not universally followed.
2. Next, gather data that shows real-life examples of the rule being followed or not followed.
3. Finally, examine your data to determine how adherence to this rule varies across (two or more) different registers, dialects, or time periods.
4. Based on your findings, would you advise writers to follow this rule?
Prescription vs Practice: Overview
Prescription vs Practice: Details• Three parts, semester-long, online
o Choose rule; demonstrate that you understand the rule; give evidence that rule exists & is controversial
o Gather data (using research corpora); assess at least 200 examples; informally reflect on process
o Write a formal paper
• Supported by smaller assignmentso How to locate similar researcho How to use research corpora at BYUo How to use MWCDEU
Will America be the death of English? . . . My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will. The outlook is dire; it is a later point in time than you think. The evidence is all around us. . . . [T]he state of the language is a commentary on the state of our society.
Edwin Newman, Strictly Speaking, p. 1
Are Americans using English any differently 40 years later?
Many Newman peeves ≠ grammar
• Malaprops• Hammer and cycle• Youths running rampart
• Redundancy• Young juveniles• Same thing in common
• Clichés• Marathon talks• Whopping wage increases
• Jargon• Stupid things politicians say
“If authored, why not authoring? Why not, He
playwrighted a play, and She paintered a picture?”
• Spelling
• Speech tics• “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.” – Richard Nixon
• “To be or not to be, that is the question. Y’know?”
“An entire letter e at the end of save was savd. In addition, an entire space was savd. Perhaps the government should say onlYou can prevent forest fires.”
Grammar peeves: Complements
Newman disapproves Newman approves
Convince to Convince that or of; persuade to
Comprised of Composed of
Different than Different from
Augur for Augur
Grammar peeves: “Weightiness”
Newman disapproves Newman approves
More importantly; Most unfortunately
More important; Most unfortunate
Medication Medicine
Impacted on Hit
-ize: verbalize, conceptualize, traumatize, finalize
speak, think, injure, finish
Grammar peeves: “Weightiness”
Newman disapproves Newman approves
Middle initials: Richard M. Nixon
Richard Nixon, President Nixon
Dense noun sequences:
Thunderstorm activity Thunderstorms
Confidence factor Confidence
Play situation Play
Grammar peeves: “Hopefully”
Abandon Hopefully all ye who enter here.
Why the decline (per Newman)?
Watergate, Vietnam, television, social upheaval . . . .
“The notion that the trouble between generations is caused by a failure in communication may have some merit, but it makes a large and not necessarily justified assumption: that there should be communication and that if there is, things will be better. I am not so sure. It may be that we have entered a time when some groups would do better to ignore each other than to communicate with each other.”
Is there evidence for any of these changes? Does anyone still care about them?
When I talk about [based on vs based off] in class, I get a bemused look, which I translate to mean "You'll die someday and then no one will care about this."Orin Hargraves, “Farewell, My Lovely Distinction” https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/ll/farewell-my-lovely-distinction/
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
1810 1850 1900 1950
Convince of vs to vs that
Newspaper mentions, 2010 – 2017 Nixon Trump
Middle name 320 273
Middle initial 25 5,081
No middle 6,863 280,965
http://corpus.byu.edu/now
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1810 1850 1900 1950 2000
Flat Adverbs vs -ly Adverbs
important , importantly ,unfortunately , unfortunate ,
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha
“Don’t use finalize to mean finish or complete.”
Common noun collocates offinalize finish completeplans school surveydeal job questionnaire
divorce season taskagreement sentence picture
details career listadoption drink degree
http://corpus.byu.edu/coca
Abstract nouns that end in -tion, -sion, -ment, -ness, -ity, -ance, -ncy, -acy, -ism, -ship, -archy
1810 1850 1900 1950 2000
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
1810 1850 1900 1950 2000
Sentence-initial Hopefully,
http://corpus.byu.edu/coha
ATEG 2017 Beth Rapp Young [email protected]
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Prescription vs Practice Part 1 Overview: Choose a prescriptive rule to research. The rule you choose must be controversial rule‐‐a rule that is not universally followed. You can use a "mythrule" from Schuster ch. 3, or a "hobgoblin" from Williams/Bizup Lesson 2, or another rule that you believe fits the category. Next, gather data that shows real‐life examples of the rule being followed or not followed (plan to examine at least 200 examples). Finally, examine your data to determine how adherence to this rule varies across (two or more) different registers, dialects, or time periods. This research project will take a significant amount of time. Expect to work on it throughout the semester. Ultimately, you will write a paper in scientific format that outlines your research. Linguistics papers usually include a review of scholarly research on the topic as well as primary research, but for this project, you will focus on primary research. For part 1, you will research the background of your rule and plan your next steps. The more care you take at this step, the less stressful the rest of the project will be. For this assignment: 1. State concisely what rule you will research, demonstrate that you understand the rule, and give a bibliographic citation or URL for the rule. For example, give the page number from Schuster, or quote the rule from an online grammar site such as Dr. Grammar http://www.drgrammar.org/frequently‐asked‐questions or Grammar Girl http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar‐girl Give the URL so that someone else could look it up and confirm that it exists. (Note: I recommend that you avoid rules involving relative clause pronouns, such as which vs that or who vs whom.) 2. Explain why you consider this rule to be controversial. For example: Is it labeled as a mythrule by any of your assigned texts? Are there online debates over the rule? Does the LanguageLog blog file it under "prescriptivist poppycock" (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5)? Does Grammar Girl consider it one of the top 10 grammar myths (http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/top‐ten‐grammar‐myths)?Is the rule a common subject of grammar "memes" or "rants" (after all, there's no need to rant about uncontroversial usages)? Do people who rant about the rule misunderstand how to follow it? For example, someone may despise the idea of ending a sentence with a preposition, but may wrongly believe that the word "it" is a preposition. 3. Look up the rule in MWCDEU and summarize what it says. Because this project focuses on primary research, you will not need to consult other secondary sources. If MWCDEU doesn't have any information about this rule, just list the terms you looked for and say that none of them yielded relevant information. An image showing the cover of MWCDEU is on your syllabus. If your book looks different, you have the wrong book. 4. Plan how you will research actual practice in online corpora. Expect to do more than just type something in the search box and record the number of hits. You will need to plan where to look for data, how to locate instances of your rule being followed and not followed, and how to analyze/interpret your data. Please be as detailed as possible in this step. Specifically, you need to answer these questions:
ATEG 2017 Beth Rapp Young [email protected]
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A. In which corpora will you look for data? I recommend you work with corpora at corpus.byu.edu because they all use a similar search interface, but you can choose other data sources (e.g., Lexis‐Nexis, Google Books, MICASE, etc.) if you can make a case that they'll work better for your specific topic. You're looking for at least 200 different examples of the rule being followed/violated. B. What kind of variation will you examine? e.g., variation in dialect (British vs American English), variation in time (American English from 1900‐1950 compared to 1950‐today), variation in register (nonfiction writing vs fiction). Depending on the type of variation, you may need to look in more than one corpus. C. What do you need to know to determine whether your examples follow the rule? For example, to investigate fewer vs less, you'll need to know whether the term is modifying a count noun or a noncount noun. To investigate nauseous vs nauseated, you'll need to figure out whether the intended meaning is "causing nausea" or "affected by nausea." To investigate hopefully, you'll need to distinguish between sentence adverbs and manner adverbs. To investigate who vs whom (which I do not recommend), you would need to know how to isolate relative clauses, how to identify the role that the relative pronoun plays in its clause, and then how to determine which grammatical case that role requires. Please choose a rule that you feel competent to investigate in the time you have available. D. What, specifically, will you search for, and why? For example, if you're investigating whether decimate is used "correctly" to mean "reduce to one‐tenth," will you look for decimate as just one part of speech or all parts of speech (why)? Will you search for just the word‐form spelled decimate or the whole lemma (why)? If you're investigating more common words such as like vs as, what can you look for that will help you screen out usages irrelevant to your investigation (e.g., I like pie, or as easy as pie)? If you're investigating figurative uses of literally, maybe you'll want to contrast them to uses of really, to determine whether the words are synonyms . . . or maybe you'll want to contrast literally to figuratively. I recommend that you refine your plans by running some test searches now. However, you should NOT expect to complete your research now. You'll probably need to run multiple searches throughout the semester. Remember, the corpus limits how many searches you can run each day/month: http://corpus.byu.edu/faq.asp#x11a [Limits are in place to eliminate spam/robo‐uses] 5. What do you expect to find, and why might these findings be interesting? Why should anyone care? What do you think might be unexpected or worth remembering about your results? For example, maybe the rule is catchy ("Cakes are done; people are finished") but rarely followed in any register, so there's no point in teaching it. Maybe the rule has little historical basis but is increasingly followed in recent years, so you should probably follow it. Maybe the rule (singular they) is normally violated in speech but rarely violated in writing, so you should only worry about it when you're writing. (Maybe the rule is primarily followed only by supervillains: https://xkcd.com/1771/ so if you hear it, look out!) Optional: The examples below are similar to the research you'll do here. . . . . You aren't required to do a literature review for this assignment, but if you are having trouble designing a research plan, you can opt to replicate all or part of a previous study. . . .
ATEG 2017 Beth Rapp Young [email protected]
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Prescription vs Practice Part 2 For this part, you should complete your corpus searches and compile your results. Use the information on the BYU Corpus Searching page to help you. Summarize your results succinctly, and include ALL of your data in an appendix. Your summary should include 1. State the rule you researched and demonstrate that you understand it. 2. Briefly list, step‐by‐step, your research process, giving links for all your search queries. 3. Summarize your findings, including both a table and illustrative examples of particular hits. The particular information you provide will depend on what you are researching. For example: Table: If you are researching the extent to which sentence adverbs such as "literally" and "really" are used in a literal sense across genres, your table might include a row for each search and columns for register, hits, and ratio:
Spoken Academic News
Lit. Fig. Amb. Lit.% Lit. Fig. Amb. Lit.% Lit. Fig. Amb. Lit.% COCA link
literally
really
(KEY: Lit. = used literally; Fig. = used figuratively; Amb. = ambiguous; Lit. % is the percentage of literal uses among all hits in that category.) Note: Be sure you know how to calculate a percentage! If you find 2 literal uses, 3 figurative uses, and 5 ambiguous uses, the literal percentage is 20% (2/(2+3+5)*100) ! Not 25% (2/(3+5)*100)! If you aren't sure how to do this correctly, ask a 6th grader. :) Examples: Explain your method for searching and coding your data, supporting your explanation with illustrative examples. For example, for the literally/really topic, your examples might include a few examples that are clearly literal, a few that are clearly figurative, and a few that are ambiguous, with an explanation of why you sorted them into which categories, e.g., Literal: "Nothing fueled my anxiety more effectively than the reminder that the ground could literally shift beneath my feet at any moment." From Christian Century, 2012. MAG. The context makes clear that the writer is worried about earthquakes. Figurative: "I was skin and bones, literally. I wasn't eating, because I was constantly sick." From PBS NewsHour, 2012. SPOK. In order to be alive, she must have had some other organs besides just skin. Ambiguous: "As Roberta Smith has written in The New York Times, The goal of' relational aesthetics is less to overthrow the museum than to turn it upside down.' Mr. Holler does that quite literally,
ATEG 2017 Beth Rapp Young [email protected]
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providing special goggles that make your eyesight do a back flip." From the New York Times, 2011. NEWS. On one hand, the museum can't possibly turn upside down. But maybe the goggles make the museum look upside down. I'm not sure how that would work, not having seen through the goggles, so is this usage literal or not? Choose examples that help illustrate the decisions you made as you analyzed your findings. If the charts provided by COCA help illustrate your findings, you should be able to copy/paste them here. In all cases, explain what the information you provide is showing; don't just list a bunch of numbers and quotations and expect me to figure it out on my own. 4. Write a page or so informally assessing your search process. Here, I'm interested in learning about successes, frustrations, anything that surprised you or convinced you to change course or to keep going, any refinements you made to your plans from part I, any remaining searches you plan to do. 5. Explain the significance of your findings. How should your findings be understood in relation to the rule? What is interesting about them? Who cares? So what? Do your findings so far give you enough evidence to advise other writers about this rule? Why or why not? 6. Attach an appendix that contains ALL the examples you examined and your determination about whether the example followed/violated the rule. Organize the examples into a table or spreadsheet. You can copy/paste from the corpus into a document or spreadsheet file. The appendix can be a separate file from the rest of Part II. In your appendix, be sure to include all information relevant to your research question. For example, if you're researching how the phrase the fact that varies across registers, don't just provide the number of hits. Your table should include at least the information from the "Context" screen: [image] And, if necessary, information from the "Expanded Context" screen: [image] Also in the appendix, you'll need to show how you coded these example s (e.g., follows rule/violates rule/ambiguous). I'll do a spot‐check of your data to see whether you are coding accurately. If you decided during Part II to research a different rule than you started with in part I, that's ok. However, you will need to redo part I and submit the part I results here along with your part II results.
ATEG 2017 Beth Rapp Young [email protected]
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Prescription vs Practice Part 3 This part should take the form of a scientific paper about your research, in .pdf format, including the following sections: Abstract: Summary of paper Introduction: State the rule and the type of variation you researched. (Why you researched) Methodology: Explain your research process. (How you researched) Findings: Present a concise, improved summary of your findings from parts I and II (What you found) Discussion: Explain what is significant and/or interesting about your findings. Based on your research, what advice would you give other students/writers about this rule? (Why the results matter) For more information about writing a scientific paper, see here: http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=83 You won't cite many outside sources, but when you do, use either MLA or APA format (whichever you know already) or a general linguistics format (available here: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/unified‐style‐sheet ). BYU corpora themselves give you information on how it should be cited; see http://corpus.byu.edu/faq.asp#cite (assuming that link works‐‐if it doesn't and you can't find the path to that info, let me know). If you decided during Part III to research something different, that's ok. However, you will need to redo parts I and II and submit those results here along with your part III results. Also, if you changed your dataset from Part II, you'll need to attach a new dataset, with ALL your coded data, in an appendix.
