ENGA1 June 2011

With lots of students looking for revision tips about ENGA1, I thought I'd add a few bits and pieces over the next week or so. The exam isn't until June 6th so there'll be at least 2 or 3 more posts on this before then.

First off, here's a new and exciting graphic of the mode continuum:

Secondly, here's a list of past text pairings for Language and Mode:

Previous ENGA1 texts

Jan 2009:

Online advert/webpage for dating tips

Phone conversation transcript between two secret lovers

May 2009:

Written version of Green Party speech

Printed guidance about avoiding wasteful use of photocopiers

Jan 2010:

Message board posts about graffiti

Online Guardian article about Banksy

May 2010

Transcript of radio interview at Glastonbury

Article from The Observer’s television listings section

Jan 2011

Transcript of part of a conversation about children’s behaviour

Webpage giving advice about bringing up children.

Future exam papers? Some suggestions:

•   written mode letters with blended mode emails/text messages/MSN “conversation” (like the sample stuff in the AQA A text book) 
• spoken conversation between 3+ participants and online conversation
• spoken commentary versus written match report  (or blended mode web commentary)
• monologue of person telling anecdote and narrative in written form
• written text that uses features of spoken mode to create “relationship” with reader

Fry and kinetic typography versus the prescriptivists

Stephen Fry - writer, actor, author and lover of language - takes on language pedants in this neat little animation. It uses "kinetic typography" (animated words and stuff) and has been put together by Matt Rogers.

There's also some discussion of Fry's views here from Russell Smith in Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail..

Worth a look if you're revising Language Discourses on ENGA3.

Hit the pause button

There's nothing I like for breakfast more than a big banana.
Can you pass me the bag of nuts?
I think I'll have the sausage, please.

What connects all of these seemingly innocuous food-related comments? Well, if you're an NBA basketball player, you'd probably want to insert (oo-er) the word pause after each. Why? To avoid sounding like you're gay, obviously. So, "I'm right behind you", "I've got your back" and "That driver was right up my arse" would all qualify as potentially smutty innuendoes requiring the pause treatment. Because to be gay in the macho world of professional sports is to be bad. Hell, it's even worse than being a girl!

Pause - according to Urban Dictionary - is used "to negate the sexual connotation of a comment" and has been recently appearing in spoken language and social networking (often Twitter) comments, perhaps following the patterns of usage of its slightly older brother no homo, which has been around since (apparently) the early 90s in hip hop slang and beyond.

The attempts by some men to police their own language use and avoid the potential embarrassment of letting slip a comment that might be perceived as gay are both interesting and slightly pathetic. Sociolinguists often look in detail at the language markers that help us define our identity and note - like Deborah Cameron does in her Myth of Mars and Venus - that we often use language as  much to define who we are not as who we are. So, in other words, the use of pause or no homo, could be a deliberate attempt to distance some men from gay men (or the stereotypical language styles associated with gay men). But why not just avoid saying things that are... like "gay"...in the first place? Well, that would be missing the point, because the whole point of using pause seems to be to draw attention to your words and encourage salacious connotations to be drawn from them before distancing yourself from the implications of the interpretation. Or something like that...

What's pathetic about it shouldn't be too hard to see. Do gay men really mince around discussing the relative merits of big bananas or succulent sausages? Probably not (unless you're Julian Clary). The whole use of pause might be seen as harmless fun, self-conscious mockery even, but at the same time it's peddling a view that gay men talk in a certain way which is easily identified and ridiculed, and that they are sex-obsessed, double-entendre-fixated "others". Some may be - surely that's up to them - but it's a lazy stereotype to assume it applies to all gay men.

So, is pause homophobic? Possibly. Is it dangerous? I'm not sure. There have got to be worse forms of linguistic homophobia than this - name-calling, abuse - but it probably says more about the speaker's attitudes to homosexuality than it does about gay men themselves.

Jay Smooth's brilliant video clip says it all so much better than me except he argues that pause came before no homo and is now (in his words) "played out", old, boring. 

Edited on 18.05.11 to add some more smutty innuendoes and a genius bit of hip hop linguistics

Birthers of new words

Morphology - the study of the form of words - is an element of grammar that sometimes gets overlooked at A level in the rush to analyse word classes and sentences, but it's an interesting and productive area. It's productive in that it helps us produce lots of new words and word forms, and productive in that it can help you produce good material in exams.

It's a particularly interesting language framework/method in two areas, child language and new word formation, and it's the latter we'll have a quick look at here. First of all, to refresh your memories about morphology, it's the study of how words themselves are made up of smaller units. Not all of this is essential reading for A level, but I think it's quite interesting to know (and A level should be more than just about doing what the spec tells you to do, shouldn't it?).

There are basically two types of morphology: derivational morphology is about creating (deriving) new words out of other units, while inflectional morphology is more to do with the ways in which words change depending on grammatical functions and forms. For example, to illustrate the latter, verbs inflect depending on the tense and aspect they're in (I walk - I walked - I am walking), the grammatical person they agree with (I walk - she walks) and nouns on whether they're singular or plural (dog - dogs), and there are plenty more too (An Introduction to English Morphology by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is a good read if you want to find out more.).

Derivational morphology is to do with putting morphemes (small units that make up words) together to create new words, so respect can become disrespect, terror become terrorise, and so on. A great deal of word formation in recent years has been the product of blending and compounding (bromance, staycation, podcast all being blends, and laptop, muffin top and bunny boiler all being compounds), but a tweet from MacMillan Dictionaries linking to this site offers some interesting examples of new words formed by derivational morphology.

They look at the use of the -er suffix in recent American neologisms. So, the people involved movement that claimed Barack Obama wasn't actually an American and demanded to see his birth certificate, became known as birthers. The US's satirical magazine The Onion even created a spoof movement that denied the providence of Obama's birth certificate after he had produced it, who were called Afterbirthers (demanding to see the placenta).

The Fritinanacy blog also mentions that those who refused to accept the official version of events for 9/11 were called truthers. Now we even have deathers, who refuse to accept that Osama Bin Laden is actually dead, an dthink that his burial at sea was all part of a cunning plan. There are older ones too. They point to right wingers, nutters and we even have some of our own, homegrown British ones such as lifers (prisoners on a life sentence) and ravers (people who like a particular club-based lifestyle).

So, if you're looking for some good examples of word formation processes to impress your ENGA3/ENGB3 examiners this summer, have a think about including morphology and the processes of prefixation (adding morphemes at the start of a root word), suffixation (adding morphemes at the end of a root word), or even infixing (adding morphemes in the middle of a root word...like hoo-f***ing-ray). It will help you avoid being a failer.

Gangsta rabble add their thang to Scrabble

According to an article in today's Daily Telegraph, Scrabble players are about to experience a massive shake-up from the slang massive. Hundreds of words from slang usage including thang and innit (and to be fair, Indian cookery and some technical jargon too) are set to appear in the new Collins Official Scrabble Words book.

On The Guardian's website, Sarah Churchwell talks about the new words and places them in the context of wider debates about new words entering mainstream use. For A2 students looking at language change and attitudes to change, it's a good article to read. As ever, the comments generated by the piece range from the deranged to the completely reasonable, so are worth a skim too.

Do the SlutWalk

The slutwalk: a bit like the cripwalk but with fewer clothes

SlutWalks are coming to a town (and dictionary) near you, but if you're a hormone-charged teenage boy don't get too excited: these slutwalks are feminist in nature and all about the ways in which women are viewed and treated by some men.

The SlutWalk is a response to a speech given by a police officer in Toronto, Canada who ill-advisedly told his student audience that if women wanted to avoid being raped they should stop "dressing like sluts". In this article in yesterday's Evening Standard, Rosamund Irwin makes the excellent point that rape is not necessarily something that happens to only scantily-clad young women, but pensioners, children and nearly all types of women in whatever type of clothing. Years ago, feminist friends made it clear to me that while sex is the means of inflicting the attack, rape is more about power and dominance than it is about sexual attraction. As Irwin points out, blaming the victim is "still a frighteningly common response to sexual assault", but it's a mindset that some people can't get out of. The SlutWalks are an imaginative and witty response to this.

This article on the BBC News magazine site takes a linguistic tack and explores the history of the word slut, making the point that very much like the n-word and queer, the word has been reclaimed... or at least, has been claimed to have been reclaimed: these things are never as simple as saying "This word used to mean x, but from now on, this word means y!".

Like other forms of reclamation, there are problems. Unreconstructed racists might still use the n-word in its pejorative and racist sense, while a black teenager from Peckham (or Tim Westwood-lookalikes) might use it in its reclaimed sense. Likewise, supporters of the gay rights movement might use queer in its reclaimed sense while homophobes and other bigots might still use it as a term of abuse. Each word exists in a state of duel identity: it's OK to use it in one context but not another. And tied in with reclamation is the idea that something in the original sense of the word is being celebrated. In the case of queer it's maybe a celebration of deviance as a positive force, with the n-word it's perhaps an embrace of the threatening, brutal aspects of the original word as a way of defiantly chucking an insult back into the faces of racists. With slut it's all about celebrating female independence and a woman's control over her own body and sexual desires.

Slut - like so many other words used to describe women's sexual behaviour and/or attractiveness - is still a loaded word, partly because of its connotations of dirt and "low morals" - but also because it is used by some men (and some women) to cast judgements on the behaviour of others. So what, you might say: lots of words do that.

The difference here, perhaps is that double-standards are at work. Just have a look at adjectives like dirty and filthy. Often these are used as terms of approval by men to describe sexually independent or adventurous women, but equally they can be used by the same men to abuse a woman they consider to be too independent or too adventurous (often because they're not having sex with them, but with someone else...).

Back in the early 1970s, Julia Stanley looked at the proportion of negative words used to label men and women and found a massive disparity, almost always in favour of men. Since then, things have changed - or so we're told. While the terms of abuse used to belittle boys and men tend to revolve around homosexuality - faggot, gay, batty man etc. - the ones used to denigrate girls and women are often related to their availability (or not) for sex with males: sket, slag, whore, junge, tight, frigid and slut.

To put it simply, lots of women - perhaps young women more than others - have to negotiate a world where to lots of boys if you're not tight, you're slack. It's not a level playing field for women, and the language used to describe them is often riddled with double-standards, so I'm all in favour of slutwalks and the rationale for holding them in the first place.

Sick timing, blud

And as if by magic, or the internet even, this tweet from Oxford Dictionaries appeared on my screen, explaining that the words wicked and sick  have had positive meanings for longer than you might think. Read all about it here.

Don't test me, fam

The directorial debut of Joe Cornish (one half of the mighty Adam and Joe), Attack the Block, looks like it will be a masterpiece of hoodies, tower blocks, grimy beats and... err... space aliens. But in this short ITN clip, it's not the plot, the genre or the aliens that get the focus, but the film's use of south London slang.

It's a neat little clip because it shows the slippery nature of slang's meanings. When we ran a poll on this blog a few months ago about the word "peak", it was given a range of different meanings. I understand it as meaning something similar to "hectic", which could be good or bad, depending on the context: a party might be hectic (exciting and a little bit cer-azy - perhaps with people chugging Top Deck shandy and robot dancing in the kitchen ), while a job interview might be hectic (scary and overwhelming, just too much, man).

One of the actors explains it as "getting overwhelming, getting too much, there's danger, it's getting peak", but as Joe Cornish explains, with mock-English teacher seriousness at the end, sometimes these words "can be flipped...their meanings can change overnight without any warning at all".

There's a good interview with Cornish here and the Adam and Joe 6Music site is here.

Calm down, dear

David Cameron's put-down of Labour MP Angela Eagles in the House of Commons last week by telling her to "calm down, dear" has been attacked by many commentators for its sexist and patronising language and tone. One of the best responses appeared in last week's Guardian from Libby Brooks who quoted feminist linguist Dale Spender in her argument, and made the point that to dismiss it as just a joke was to misunderstand the power of language and its relationship to social context:

Because language really, really matters. It is fundamental to how we construct and convey meaning. And when that meaning is: "I am expressing paternalistic concern at your inability [as a woman] to rein in your emotion" then yes, that is sexist and yes, it is a big deal. To undermine her anger as hysteria, to reference her femaleness, is a particularly male way of putting a woman down.

Going on to link Cameron's comment to the Sky Sports sexism furore a couple of months ago, Brooks makes the point that sexist banter exists in a world where these notions aren't challenged and how we shouldn't let people (usually) men get away with this dismissive and demeaning language.

A wider point here is that taken out of context, the word dear probably isn't that bad - it's certainly not on the same level as many of the frequent, offensive terms used daily - bitch, cow, slag and the like - but it's the context that imbues it with its offence. It's the way its use represents a stance on the part of the speaker ("I am in a superior position to you and can address you in whatever way I choose") and ties in to a broader picture of social inequality - Cameron and his chums are largely the product of single-sex boarding schools, who treat gender equality as a hilarious wheeze, rather than an issue to be taken seriously - that make it such an inflammatory language act.

Edited to add comma in title - apologies for punctuation fail

Media Texts and Language Interventions: helpful article

It's probably too late for this year's A2 students to get much out of this link, because you really should have handed in your coursework by now, but this article (which I've nabbed from a suggestion by Julie Blake on the Teachit Language Sputnik) offers a very readable explanation of what's needed in good science journalism.

As Julie points out over on her site, a Media Text (B spec) or Language Intervention (A spec) is often concerned with making a difficult, quite specialist idea accessible for a mainstream, non-specialist audience, very much like science journalism has to do. The article gives some helpful pointers as to what you can do.

I'll explain everything to the geeks

If there has been a theme to recent postings (and there doesn't have to be, of course)  it's probably something to do with new words, language change and lexicography, so here's a quick link to an OED article by John List about words that don't make it into the dictionary and how they're still words.

Elsewhere on the Oxford Dictionaries site (which is becoming a useful A level Language resource these days) are some good pages on recent lexical and semantic changes, with some interesting discussion of geek, viral and meme, all good examples of how technology and social networking are affecting the language we use and the lifestyles we live.

From punk'd to skunked...

...and following on from the earlier post about Urban Dictionary and the role of dictionaries in charting language change, here's a link to a really good Ben Zimmer post on Visual Thesaurus about the "skunking" of words. He talks about it in relation to shifts in meaning for the words nonplussed and bemused.

As Ben points out In the case of nonplussed, the old meaning is "bewildered," while the new meaning is "unfazed". And with bemused, it's perhaps a more significant shift:

As the Visual Thesaurus wordmap for bemused indicates, the two primary meanings of bemused are "deeply absorbed in thought" or "perplexed by many conflicting situations or statements." The way that political reporters have used it about Obama, however, is "above it all, with a trace of amusement," in the words of New York Times deputy news editor Philip B. Corbett. Corbett adds, "but that's not what bemused means." Well, it's not what the word has historically meant, but the newer sense, influenced by amused, has become mainstream enough to enter some dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate.

"Skunked" seems like a good way of describing words that have two slightly different meanings for different groups of people at the same time. Perhaps they are words that are in the process of shifting from meaning 1 to meaning 2 but now just cause confusion because of this ongoing shift, and therefore should be avoided...like a skunk.

Of course, to loads of teenagers in the UK, the word "skunk" has totally different connotations (think "herbal" cigarettes and glazed expressions), so is that a "skunked" meaning itself?

Seeing language change actually happen in front of us is a fascinating thing and should be a reminder to us that language isn't about black and white but gradience. If you're an A level student revising for your Language Change exam, bear in mind that while we often teach you about periods of change (Early Modern English, Middle English etc.) the divides between these periods and the consistency of usage of a particular form at a particular time have never been that smooth. Above all, language is used by real - and often very different - people who don't all act or speak in the same way.

Keeping it real or just making it up?

This article from last week's Guardian takes a good look at the rise of Urban Dictionary and its approach to gathering new words compared to that of more established dictionaries like the OED and Collins. This brief extract puts it nicely:

Now, you are unlikely ever to confuse the OED with Urban Dictionary – one is the definitive record of the English language, the other is a rambling free-for-all largely compiled by teenagers making stuff up – but the comparison remains. Until relatively recently a word wasn't recognised as such until it was recorded in a proper dictionary. Now neologisms are pouring into the language like never before; our vocabulary is being reshaped by texters, tweeters, bloggers, marketeers and have-a-go contributors. Slang used to take decades to cross the Atlantic; now it takes minutes.

The article offers some debate (good for ENGA3 Language Discourses) about the importance and authority of Urban Dictionary, with slang specialist and lexicographer Jonathon Green arguing that it's quite a fun resource, but not one which we should rely on for authenticity and accuracy, while the dictionary's founder, Aaron Peckham, argues that it's an evolving and multifaceted document of our times. There are other arguments too about the rights and wrongs of putting what might be ephemeral, vogue words into a dictionary of the OED's standing, with some arguing that muffin-top and OMG have no real place in such an authoritative tome.

The best line in the whole feature has to belong to Green though, who states: "My response to people saying slang destroys the language is: bollocks.You always see the same themes: drugs, drink, sex, parts of the body and what people do with them, being nasty to each other, racist stuff. It doesn't do compassion very well. But slang is lively, exciting and very creative". Amen to that.

Linguist, writer and creator of the excellent Visual Thesaurus site, Ben Zimmer, reviews Jonathon Green's Slang Dictionary here, with a really insightful look at how Green traces the shifting meanings of the word punk. Evidence, if any were really needed, that analysing slang tells us a huge amount about the language we've used on the past and the ways in which language is shaped by social change and in turn contributes to our own social attitudes.

So, whether you prefer the OED's slow but steady approach or the quick fix of instant gratification that Urban Dictionary gives you, slang definitely needs a closer look as it's tied up with who we are, where we are from and where we are going. And slang is ace. Word to your mother, bro.

Edited on 3.05.11 to add link to Guardian article (durrrrrr)

The geeks shall inherit the earth

online standardisation or online gaming?

While the OED adds OMG and FYI to its (digital) pages and argument rages over where LOL was first used (was it among geeks on usenet, mobile phone text messagers or old ladies thinking it meant lots of love on messages to their grandchildren?) a whole area of abbreviation seems to have been overlooked.

This article on gamer slang which appears on Nerd Trek summarises some of the abbreviations used by online gamers who play World of Warcraft, Everquest and Lord of the Rings Online, among others. Like lots of these things, the abbreviations are a generally accepted shorthand (mostly initialisms and the odd acronym) designed to speed up communication between players when they're chatting to other players or cooperating at moments of high drama, like when you're you're about to take down Gamgee, the mystical dwarf of Nimbus 5 and haven't powered up your level 45 inferno spell.

We covered some gamer slang on this blog a while ago (here and here), but since I have regained control of my life by  stopping playing such games (all hail the Xbox 360 and two slipped discs for helping rid me of my crippling MMORPG addiction!) I've not really followed it as closely as I used to, but it looks like nothing much has changed in the language of online games in a little while. With the rise of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and programmes like Ventrilo, which allow you to talk to other gamers, perhaps the days of language innovation in online gamer chat are over?

LOL For The Win

The OED's decision to add LOL, OMG and the verb to heart to its latest update has already been covered here on this blog, but this BBC News Magazine piece about LOL is a really good read, not just for its content but also its form and style, which make it a neat example of how a Language Intervention (ENGA4) or Media Text (ENGB4) might work. It's also a good example of the sort of short article that can appear on the ENGA3 paper for Language Change, offering plenty of scope for discussion about attitudes to change, reasons for change and processes that help changes spread.

Listen up y'all

This post by Ben Trawick-Smith on Dialect Blog is a really concise and fascinating insight into the migration of a phrase from Scotland to Ireland and then to the south of the USA and up to the northern states, spreading out from its original usage base of poor white farmers to African American slaves and then into wider multiethnic usage.

The expression is y'all and it's a second person plural pronoun (as distinguished from you which acts as both 2nd person singular and plural in Standard British English). For a neat little case study into how language spreads, which could be perfect for A level, go no further.

ENGA3: some tips for success (part two)

Here's the second instalment of a series of posts designed to help you cope with the A2 exam in June (June 24th to be precise). Last time we looked at the Assessment Objectives on the paper and some ideas about approaches to AO2, and this time we'll have a fairly quick look at how to deal with AO3.

What is AO3? Well, on the mark scheme for ENGA3 it's described as follows:  "Analyse and evaluate the influence of contextual factors on the production and reception of spoken and written language". That's quite broad, so what are examiners really looking for when they award AO3 marks?

Looking in a bit more detail at the mark scheme, we can see the following descriptors in the top 2 bands (10-12 and 13-15):

13-15

• Demonstrates analytical grasp of how language works across different levels.
• Places analysis in wider contexts.
• Shows perceptive/conceptualised/illuminating/ open-minded approach.
• Uses interesting and judicious examples and quotation.
• Evaluates appropriateness/success. 

10-12

• Analyses language features, their explanatory context and their communicative impact confidently
• Makes a subtle interpretation integrating various levels of description.
• Explores texts' meaning, purpose and effects.
• Makes evaluative comments which are well supported.

So, in essence, if AO1 is all about identifying and labelling significant language features, AO3 is more to do with working out what those language features do, what they mean and how they are used to represent what the writers/speakers think about their subject matter. Tied in with these is also a need to use appropriate examples to show where these things are happening, and also an awareness of the contexts the texts are from - whether they're spoken or written, produced for a specific or general audience, how the writers position themselves in relation to their audiences.

One of the big problems for lots of candidates taking this paper is that there is a lot to do and explaining the effects of language can be harder for some people than just labelling a noun or a simple sentence. But then again, that's why it's an A level paper that you take in your second year rather than as AS one: it's supposed to be a challenge.

A key point to remember is that for AO3 you must have some idea about what the subject matter is and how the writer feels about it. For example, in the paper from June 2010, there were two language change texts - one a diary entry from a mother in World War 2 and the other a blog entry on a journalists' website - but it was quite rare to find candidates saying very much about how each writer felt towards the events and experiences they were describing. Plenty of people were good on talking about how the technological advances of the Twenty First Century allow bloggers to communicate with a global audience and keep audiences up to date with world events, or how the diary used an elliptical style, but there wasn't much on the emotions of the mother writing the diary entry or the way in which war reporting was being represented as fun and fashionable in the blog.

So, how do you write about this sort of thing? First of all, I'd suggest that you get a clear idea of what it is the writers are actually talking about. Read the texts carefully. Lots of students last year took a quick look at the blog and assumed it was about war: it wasn't; it was about the lifestyles of foreign correspondents and war reporters and the ways in which journalists view themselves and the work they do.

Secondly, once you're clear on what's really being addressed, try to identify the angle/s the writer is taking. In text A we could see that the mother felt restricted and unable to say much of importance in her letters to her prisoner-of-war son: "For one thing, news is scarce when one cuts out the war, and one may not say anything to give any information to the enemy. So things have to be carefully sifted till there is very little said.".

In the second text, the rather relaxed attitude of the blogger is revealed by his casual use of military metaphors "And we won’t just be blasting you blog style. Oh no, no, no... We’re coming at you with each and every social media gun blazing.".

So, in these two texts you could have picked up some solid AO3 marks if you compared the anxious, concerned stance of text A's writer with the laid-back approach of blogger B.

For Language Discourses - the second section of the paper - AO3 is actually a bit easier, I think. Because the whole point of section B is to make you look at arguments about language, the texts chosen will have identifiable viewpoints. Often, these viewpoints will be very clear to see and you'll be able to find plenty of evidence to back up your interpretation of (say) writer D as a strong prescriptivist or writer E as a more open-minded descriptivist. But it's not always that easy...

The writers may not be particularly consistent - they may shift between positions on different issues. The paper in January 2011 featured two articles about texting, one by Will Self and one by Lynne Truss. Both were quite anti-textspeak but were actually quite positive about technology and text messaging itself. In last June's paper, several of John Humphrys' points could be identified as being very prescriptive, but others are harder to place.

In these cases, this is where the "open-minded" descriptor of AO3 comes in. If you want to do well on the paper, show that you're not just making a blanket judgement about a writer's views, but point to where you think you see certain views and even how those views might shift as the text goes on or contradict each other.

Another key thing to remember with AO3 is how the author is positioning him/herself in relation to the reader. Are they trying to speak as one of "us" (whoever we are are...) or as an expert with specialist knowledge to impart? In John Humphrys' attack on descriptivist linguists in the June 2010 paper, he was cunning in his approach of distancing himself from linguists with their fancy ideas and academic viewpoints, and keen to represent himself as a "normal" person who speaks "common sense". But remember, "common sense" is only that which appears normal at a given time and it can be plain wrong. A hundred years ago it was "common sense" to smoke cigarettes because they were good for your lungs, apparently. Fifty years ago it was "common sense" to not give Black Americans equal rights...

That's it for now on this particular post, but we'll pick up Language Discourses in another post soon and also have a look at how to integrate theory and research into answers on language change and variation.

Twintastic

As the proud father of twins (although not so proud now one has started claiming he's an Arsenal supporter), I really liked the clip of babbling twins that circulated on the web last week. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's here.

There's also a nice bit of analysis of what's going on, provided by a child speech expert.

100 word vocabulary

Fabio Capello's claim that he only needs 100 words of English to communicate with his England footballers has sparked lots of silly (but fun) discussions about what those words might be. The BBC covered it here, The Guardian reckoned that beaten excuse quarter final, Germany, jagerbomb, lager and WAGs might be in there, while today's G2 extends the 100 words to other occupations including taxi drivers (Where left right lights immigration stop roadworks traffic not being funny but come over here free council houses bloody liberty politicians all same)  and teachers (You sit quiet please everyone now enough gum tie shirt homework yes today excuses no book open page talking stop discipline noise courtesy while others trying learn). But why stop there? George Osborne would only need 3 words (cut, gloat and slime) so that would be easy, but what about other jobs and professions?

Thinking of those 100 words that are used most frequently, is there a way in which patterns in their grammar could be discerned? Katherine Nelson's study of children's first words back in 1973 showed that one year-olds tended to favour nouns heavily among their first 50 words, but what would the pattern be for you?

Wikipedia uses data from Oxford Dictionaries to assemble the 100 most frequently used words in English, but this data is drawn from written texts primarily, making it very different from what a person would say in a normal day of speaking.

Perhaps an interesting language investigation at A2 would be to record a few minutes of conversation every hour and log the words used, their frequency and word class, to establish the patterns in your own speech and that of others.

My Little Pony must die

The language used to target young consumers (or children as we used to call them) is often designed to appeal to their developing sense of gender identity, and some would argue that many ads manipulate that identity to encourage boys and girls into thinking that certain toys and games are only for the other gender. I've seen it happen with my own kids who've left the protective cocoon of CBeebies and CBBC and entered the commercial wasteland that is ITV2 and the Cartoon Network.

This brilliantly simple piece of corpus analysis using Wordle (and flagged up by an anonymous person on the English Language list today) takes the language of TV ads and represents them in word clouds. The results based on gender are really striking:

boys' toys

girls' toys

The effects of this kind of polarised language are harder to gauge perhaps, but it's pretty stunning that in the 21st Century kids are still being sold a line that fighting is what boys do and love is what girls do. This pressure group - Pink Stinks - has done some good work in challenging gender stereotypes around children's toys and clothes, and is well worth a look.

For A level Language Investigations (AS ENGA2 projects into representation for the AQA A spec or ENGB4 for the A2 investigation in AQA B) this sort of work is ideal.

Dictionary Flow

This is a neat little flowchart to explain how words enter dictionaries. Have a look here.

Anarchy in the UK

The 500,000-strong protests against the government's crippling cuts programme went ahead peacefully on Saturday, but to read the mainstream media you would have thought that the day was marked by an orgy of violence and destruction. Approximately 0.04% of those on the march were engaged in some sort of trouble, and even then 140 of the arrests have been for the outrageous crime of aggravated trespass, for sitting in a shop peacefully.

Chief among the media's targets are protesters whom they term "anarchists". In today's Evening Standard, the columnist Sam Leith takes issue with the label "anarchist" as a catch-all term of abuse for any violent protester. Radio 4's Today programme discussed the philosophy and political strands of anarchism earlier in the day too, from class war anarchism through to pacifist, pastoral anarchism.

One of Leith's more serious points is that the word "anarchist"  has become "an all-purpose boo-word for those who protest in ways we don't consider acceptable; and, cripplingly, a way of muddying and ignoring the actual political positions of the quarter of a million people who marched peacefully on Saturday" and it's a good one to make.

The word is being chucked around with little thought for what it really means and that's not very helpful. It seems to be an example of semantic broadening, where the label itself has expanded to cover an increasing range of connotations - thuggish behaviour, disorder, chaos - when the word's original denotation means none of those things.

Even more bizarre is the increasing obsession with what these "anarchists" will do when the royal wedding is on. Will they turn up and kick over old ladies' tables and upset tea urns at the street parties that literally...err... tens of people will be holding? Will they sip from tins of Special Brew and sneer as the happy couple tie the knot? What sick filth will these anarchists come up with next?

Whatever your views on violent protest and the need to oppose government cuts  - and personally I don't think smashing up shop windows and fighting with the police down side streets is a particularly clever or successful way of gaining support for the cause - the whole way in which language is used to represent protests and all those involved has got to be worthy of a bit of extra scrutiny, particularly when the media coverage of half a million marchers gets relegated to the inside pages while the actions of (at most) a couple of hundred people make the front page and set the news agenda.

TMI? New initialisms make it into dictionary

Can a dictionary ever have Too Much Information? Has the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gone too far in adding initialisms like LOL, OMG and FYI to its latest update?

Probably not, because even though these initialisms (initial letters sounded out as their letter names) and acronyms (initial letters sounded out as a complete word) aren't really words as such, they're increasingly frequent in their use and functionally very handy.

What's also interesting about them is that they often have a longer history than we might realise:

As is often the case, OED’s research has revealed some unexpected historical  perspectives: our first quotation for OMG is from a personal letter from 1917; the letters LOL had a previous life, starting in 1960, denoting an elderly woman (or ‘little old lady’; see LOL n./1); and the entry for FYI  [FYI phr., adj., and n.], for example, shows it originated in the language of memoranda in 1941.

Elsewhere in the same OED update, the use of the verb "to heart" is commented upon. We're no doubt all familiar with T-shirts bearing the I ♥ NY/LDN/your mum logo or something similar, but the expression "to heart" is now registering as a bona fide version of "to love":

From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’

The number you are calling has been disconnected...

Mother? Can you hear me, mother?

This article in today's G2 by Jess Cartner-Morley looks at the way in which the landline phone is dying a death. It's more a piece of cultural commentary than a linguistic discussion, but raises some quite intriguing ideas about the ways in which we communicate these days.

Coming from the generation in which we did actually dial a number by putting our pinkies in the dial and turning it round, then telling the person at the other end who we were, I can just about cope with caller display and mobile phones which use different ringtones for different callers. I can even cope with texting, even though I was taught to text by my Colchester students back in 1998 and then taught how to use predictive text by the boyfriend of one of my ex-students, embarrassingly for me quite recently... down the pub in 2008. But to me a landline was always a given, especially for having a chat to parents or siblings.

As Cartner-Morley tells us, it's all different now, even for people in their 30s and 40s:

My landline rarely rings these days. And even when it does, I usually don't answer it. It seems like an increasingly alien concept, picking up a phone without knowing who is on the other end, so as often as not I let the answerphone pick up. Oh, and I never, ever listen to landline answerphone messages. My reasoning is that a message left at a house when someone's not even there must by definition be so non-urgent that it doesn't need listening to. I assume that if anyone actually needs me, they will reach me on my mobile, or by text or email. And this, at the grand old age of 37. For millions of today's twentysomethings, who have had a mobile number since their teens and for whom a landline makes no practical sense during the transient years before they settle down, the moment of opting into landline-owning may never come if it becomes an expensive extra. My sister and my closest colleague, for instance, both have grown-up jobs and mortgages, but no landlines.

 She finishes the article by suggesting that it's probably not healthy or helpful to rely on texts, tweets and emails to conduct our lives:

It would be sad if, having crammed our lives full of texting, tweeting and status updates, we no longer have the energy to speak to people who want to talk to us. There are repercussions of cutting ourselves in or out of the loop as we please, because real community doesn't work like that. Interestingly, relatively new forms of online interaction, such as Twitter and BBM instant-messaging, have returned to a more conversational, back-and-forth style, rather than the hit-and-run approach of sending an email. Horror films have moved on from the snipped landline to the dreaded out-of-battery/low-signal plot device. But in real life, we're all running scared from a ringing phone.

 This article from the NY Times offers a similar take on the same subject, but contains the great summary "You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail".

To verb like no one has verbed before

The English language is always adding new words to its lexicon and it's also quite partial to using existing words in new ways: we're all aware of lexical and semantic changes and can probably point to several new words or new meanings that we've spotted every month, whether it's a charming new (?) word for stabbing someone or a knife used to do it (nank), a word to describe an attractive member of the opposite sex (reem, choong or boom) or an old word like optics used in a strange new context (to describe public perception of a war event) .

But English is also pretty flexible in its adaptation of a word from one class to another, something that's generally called conversion or functional shift, but which has often been called verbing too. It's probably worth being clear here that we're not talking about derivational morphology where a word is altered so it functions in a new word class (like walk - walker, run - runner, smile - smiler) but a straightforward shift from (usually) a noun to a verb without any extra bits (morphemes) being added.

On Radio 4's Today Programme this morning, a housing expert talked about the process of staircasing and referred to shared ownership buyers who staircase their share of a property. The process is probably familiar to lots of public sector workers (including me) who have found that shared ownership is about the only way they could afford to buy a house of their own, but clearly sounded a bit odd to the presenter, John Humphrys, who needed an explanation of this term.

Jonathan Marks on the MacMillan Dictionary blog has looked at other examples of this process in a number of posts about the subject and he provides lots of good illustrations. Have a look here, here and here to see what kinds of examples he cites.

It's also interesting to look up some examples in the OED and see if you can see which usage came first. I was under the impression that to ramp was a fairly recent verb ("to ramp up prices") and it may be fairly recent in its use as a phrasal verb (with the up particle) but its use as a verb predates its appearance as a noun by about 300 years, although the various different meanings of the word may slightly complicate that.

RIP Smiley Culture

It was really sad to hear of the death of Smiley Culture, the genius behind Cockney Translation and Police Officer, in really strange and disturbing circumstances this week.

The lyrics of Cockney Translation were some of the first to really address the ways in which Caribbean slang and dialect and home-grown varieties like Cockney were starting to come together to create what most of would recognise as Multicultural London English/ Multi-ethnic youth dialect  these days. While the song is all about differences in slang, it's the shared subject matter and the celebration of different words that make this such a great song, especially considering the time when it first came out and the social unrest and race riots that had been part of the landscape around the early 1980s.

Musically and lyrically Smiley Culture led the way for people like The Streets, Lethal Bizzle, Dizzee Rascal and many other performers who've been happy to mix and match words from different strands of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds to create a new form of speech.

RIP David Emmanuel AKA Smiley Culture

Tweeting and blogging and everything in between

I've just been to a lecture on Twitter and digital identity, delivered by Dr Claire Warwick of the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL and it was interesting to hear different angles on how we create identities online and through microblogging resources like Twitter. Some of it is clearly linguistic - the words we choose to use that reveal something about who we are or the identity we wish to present to others - but other parts of the talk touched on areas that were a bit more sociological: who uses these new media forms, differences between digital natives and newcomers, gender and identity performance.

Claire Warwick mentioned that gender and language was an area they were keen to explore, but it was perhaps a bit disappointing that having been enlightened by Deborah Cameron's brilliant lecture on the Myth of Mars and Venus at the emagazine conference yesterday, I heard the old stereotypes about men doing x and women doing y - even if it is updated for a new medium like Twitter - being repeated.

There may well be some significant gender differences in whether we use @replies, or if we "chat" and/or "tell", but it's probably not helpful to reduce it all to broad generalisations in this way, and maybe more revealing to look at language and identity within genders too.

Anyway, this is only a minor gripe and one I'm sure they'll address when they start their research into the whole area. The lecture was really interesting, particularly for a relatively new tweep (tweeting person? Twitter person?) like me. The lecture is (or soon will be) available from here.

Eleshere, this blog post about the word blog is a good read. We all know about the noun blog being a blend of web + log, but did you know it's being used as an intransitive verb to blog and as a transitive verb to blog something? Here, you can find out more.

Emagazine Language conference is tomorrow!

Just a reminder that the conference I've been working on with Barbara Bleiman and the English and Media Centre is happening tomorrow at the Institute of Education, London. You can see the details here and the full programme of speakers is here.

If you're coming along, please say hi. If you mention Haribo and perform a secret handshake you'll get mentioned on the blog next week.

Baby Gaga

a view from one of the cameras

Deb Roy's longitudinal study of his own son's acquisition of language is the focus of this TED lecture. It's a clear explanation of how he went about gathering many hundreds of thousands of hours of data and some observations about what the data tells us about how his child's language developed over three years, particularly the social dimensions of interaction and acquisition. The idea of feedback cycles - caregiver speech and child's speech working together in an ongoing process of acquisition and influence - is a key point from the lecture.

One particular case study is his son's movement from gaga to water (from about 5 minutes in). The "wordscapes" created from the data are pretty amazing to look at and the tagging of particular words is a particularly fascinating way of mapping language to events. So, for example, Roy and his team have mapped the child's use of words to where he and other family members were in the house and who they were talking with. Here's the wordscape for water:

"water" wordscape, with peaks in the kitchen

You can also read more about the study in this pdf.

What's also interesting, as the lecture goes on, is Roy's team's application of this model to patterns of language usage beyond his own son and house and into the wider world, where mapping of language is linked very closely to national media events.

You say tomato; I say potato

The British Library's research into accents in the UK has attracted media interest, with some of the first findings being made public. This report in the Daily Mail takes a look at some of the results and offers the view that we aren't adopting American pronunciation as rapidly as some had assumed. Of course, this being the Daily Mail, they have to build in some kind of reactionary nationalism, stating that "many British English speakers are refusing to use American pronunciations" (my italics) which suggests that it's a conscious decision, when change often doesn't work like that.

Jonnie Robinson, curator of the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library (and speaker at the Emagazine Language conference this Wednesday) is quoted in the story:

British English and American English continue to be very distinct entities and the way both sets of speakers pronounce words continues to differ. But that doesn’t mean that British English speakers are sticking with traditional pronunciations while American English speakers come up with their own alternatives. In fact, in some cases it is the other way around. British English, for whatever reason, is innovating and changing while American English remains very conservative and traditional in its speech patterns.

John Wells looks at The Guardian's coverage of the study here and is a bit more sceptical about what the results tell us.

On a similar theme, but this time focusing on dialect and spelling, the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan writes in the Daily Telegraph about the influence of  the internet on spreading American English (rather than English English) around the world.

More is more

intensive reading?

There's a really good response by Melody Dye on the Scientopia blog to the Robert Lane Greene article in the NY times (which I blogged about here) this week.

Dye, who is a cognitive science researcher at Stanford University, argues that Greene's article doesn't go far enough in its attack on prescriptivist thinking and she makes several interesting points about reading as well as writing. She argues - quoting Joshua Foer - that people's reading habits have changed from "intensive" reading of a very few texts to "extensive" reading,  valuing quantity over "quality".

Dye's argument is that as we get more choice over what we read - increasingly being able to pursue our own niche interests in music, film, literature, TV - a bottom-up model of language change is exerting its power more than ever. If standardisation is all about imposing a top-down model then, she argues, what's happening now is that more "writers" (if we're calling texting, tweeting and Facebooking "writing", and I'm happy to) are writing more stuff and it's less standardised than ever before.

extensive reading?

But that does rely on the assumption that standardisation is designed to (as Dye puts it)  "conventionalize, and even ‘crystalize,’ our language according to certain norms, and to make it more uniformly patterned ". Straight after that she adds "Education is one forcible means of (attempting to) root out non-standard ‘grammars’ (such as African American Vernacular English) and of homogenizing usage"...all of which tends to sound to me like she's arguing that education can be a big bad force for social control, a viewpoint that's problematic for me as an English teacher (who wants to see everyone get a good education in a standard form of English) and as a politically left-wing person (who values non-standard forms too and sees them as part of a wider picture of language use), but for two very different reasons.

Does education really have to be like this? Does the teaching of a standard form necessarily preclude an appreciation and study of non-standard varieties? You could argue that the very existence of  Standard English means that all other varieties - and remember, Standard English was chosen very deliberately out of existing varieties of English - are treated as inferior.

You could equally argue though, that if we don't have a standard we have no shared language, no means of communicating with each other on a level playing field and that the ones who will really suffer are not those at the top of society but those at the bottom. In this case, Standard English might be seen as a democratising force, giving linguistic power to everyone in a society.

I suppose what I'd like to see* (and what I think is partly delivered in the English Language A level, if not elsewhere in the English curriculum) is a model like this that opens up the history and development of English as a language, and lets us look at how it became what it is now and where it's going. It should be a model that allows us to interrogate the idea of a standard and see how it's become important over time, while helping students develop their own grasp of that standard, and their understanding of all the non-standard forms around us - many of which like texting and tweeting are in fact changing what might be the Standard English of years to come.

Melody Dye develops her argument by looking outside the natural homes of English - the UK and the USA - too:

In broadening our picture of the forces at work in language change, we might also consider how English is being influenced from the outside.  According to one statistic, there are now something like three times as many non-native speakers of English as there are native speakers.  English is thus being reappropriated by foreign speakers, both on our shores (in the tides of immigrants that come to this country) and off it (in English creoles and pidgins, and in widespread lexical borrowing), and these reformulations are, in turn, shifting the normative space of what is acceptable.

Where this fits in to the study of Language Change and Language Discourses at A level is interesting, I think, and should allow you plenty of scope for discussion and exploration in your work. The English Language is clearly changing - it always has - but is it now changing so quickly, thanks to technology creating so many new users of English all over the world and spreading non-standard forms  - that what we know as Standard English is rapidly disappearing?  Perhaps a new standard is being formed even now, a type of English that we can all understand but which doesn't much resemble the Standard English we've seen before. And maybe that new standard is actually being created away from the places previously considered to be the home of the English language.



Edited 11.46 11/03/11
I'd also like to see world peace and international socialism. Is that not too much to ask?

More is less?

This blog post on the New York Times opinion site offers a fairly convincing picture of increasing levels of literacy (in the USA, admittedly, but probably broadly comparable to the UK) between 1870 and the late 20th Century. It's a picture that backs up Robert Lane Greene's broader point that the people who say our language is in decline are basically just wrong.

His argument, one developed in his new book You Are What You Speak, is that the "sticklers" - those who say that we're less able to punctuate, construct "correct" grammatical structures and speak clearly - are missing the point that more and more people are actually writing than ever before. He explains: "We easily forget that this is something that farmhands and the urban poor almost never did in centuries past. They lacked the time and means even if they had the education".

It's a convincing argument in many ways and one that echoes much of what other descriptivists have said about the to hell in a handcart arguments of prescriptivists. But what's less certain is what is happening to the quality of the communication that many of us are now engaged in. Does more writing actually mean less quality?

If we include Facebook, texting and tweets as writing, we must be - as a world population - producing billions and billions of words every day, far outstripping what people wrote even ten years ago, let alone fifty or a one hundred. So, what of this sort of writing? Are we seeing a language in decline even as it grows? Greene thinks not, adding towards the end of his post, "We may be just be seeing more of language’s real-world diversity – dialect, nonstandard grammar and all – in written form, whereas a 150 years ago those same people would never write. That’s something to celebrate, not to complain about".

In saying this, Greene echoes an observation made by Henry Hitchings in The Language Wars about the Eighteenth Century prescriptivists, many of whom felt that educating the masses - making them literate - was actually a threat to the language itself. Their thinking seemed to be that more users meant worse language. But this thinking seems to demonstrate an underlying fear that democracy leads to disintegration.

Another factor to throw into this debate (and I have to be honest, I'm not quite sure what I think about this in the end) is a suggestion made by someone commenting on Greene's post that if writing is increasing, perhaps reading, of anything other than texts and tweets, might actually be falling. From this perspective, while the output is growing, there's a kind of feedback loop of broken, abbreviated English creating more and more mashed up language. The argument, I suppose, is that if you put crap in you'll get crap out.

It would be interesting to see what figures we have for how much people read compared to previous decades, and what it is they read. The to hell in a handcart brigade usually argue that we're in a near-permanent state of idiocy, which gets worse day by day. Grown-ups read Harry Potter and Twilight...English GCSE students watch Romeo and Juliet on DVD and read three passages of the original...etc. etc. but they tend to ignore the rise of reading groups, the impact of popularising programmes like the Oprah Winfrey show and even Richard & Judy's Book Club that have made a big impact on the reading habits of many thousands of people.

So, what is really happening and what should we say? Should we, as Greene does, celebrate the rise of writing, or should we bemoan the state of the writing that is now produced?

Texting: too many LOLZ, not enough R&J

As mentioned on here many times before, the USA has caught onto texting a bit later than us in the UK, so the moral panics about texting and literacy, texting and repetitive thumb injuries and texting and attention spans have hit their media fairly recently. I'm only saying this again to cling on to a deeply pathetic sense of superiority over this one tiny achievement when, in all other fields, the USA beats our increasingly rubbish country.

This article in the Seattle Times takes a look at the ways in which the language of texting is leaking into some students' written work and the concerns that have been raised about this. It's a good article because there's some attention given to less hysterical viewpoints, and even the students quoted are honest when they admit that sometimes they're just lazy and CBA 2 switch styles.

It's also quite a good style model for an ENGA4 Language Intervention or an ENGB4 Media Text, I think.

If you are looking for more articles about texting, click on the texting label at the end of this post and you'll find loads more.

Pigeons and Creoles

Stephen Kelman's debut novel about life on an estate in Luton, Pigeon English, gets some good coverage in today's Independent. The novel, which plays on the word pidgin - a simplified language often used to communicate between people who don't share a common tongue - in its title, is praised for its authentic-sounding slang and its 1st person narrative perspective, which views the often brutal world around through the eyes of a child. I've not read it yet, but it's getting good reviews all over the place and a book with language like this at its core sounds like a good read to me.

The Independent article mentions Gautum Malkani's Londonstani as part of its survey of other slang-driven narratives, and ex-SFX student and onetime blogger on here, Charissa King did a post on the language of this book while she was at university. South London writer Alex Wheatle also gets a name check in the article (as should Courttia Newland!) and of course Irvine Welsh, who was arguably one of the first to really capture and popularise the vernacular in modern fiction with Trainspotting, is referred to as well.

edited on 14.03.11 to add: now I've got the book, it looks like it's set in South London and not Luton. I think Luton is where Kelman grew up, but I might be wrong...

ENGA3: some tips for success (part one)

Last year we posted some top tips for the ENGA3 exam to help you out with final revision work near exam time, so this year we're going to start a bit earlier and give you a chance to mull over approaches that might take a bit longer to develop. Of course, you'll get plenty of good advice from your own teachers and from the exam board and text book (especially if you're at SFX where your teachers were recently described by an Ofsted inspector as possessing "bare skillz... and that ain't even a lie").

Now the paper's been examined three times (January and June 2010 and January 2011) you can probably get a clearer picture of the types of question that might appear and the approaches that will help you do well on it.

The Principal Examiner for ENGA3 doesn't want you to "question spot" or try to second guess what's going to be on the paper, because:
a) if you get it wrong you'll come a cropper in the exam and have to answer a question on a topic you know nothing about  - like George Osborne taking an economics exam;
and
b) many of the topic areas actually overlap, so knowledge from (say) variation could also apply really well to change. It makes sense to know as much as you can about all the topics. And anyway, as the great philosopher Dappy from out of N-Dubz once said, "knowledge is power". He also said "In The Slum Put Ur Hands Up Brap", so I'm not sure we can entirely trust him.


The top tips from last year still hold true and you can find them here, but here are some extra ideas that should help you do well if you get on the case soon. There's quite a lot to say, so I'm going to drip feed it in different blog posts over the next few weeks. And remember, these are just my own take on the paper taken from teaching it and marking it, not any secret inside information. You can take them or leave them and I'm happy to argue the toss about any of these, refine them or add new ideas if you have any of your own.

Think about the mark weightings and prepare accordingly
On this paper the assessment objectives (AOs) are very important. They always are of course, but the balance of them in A2 is different from AS. On each question, the marks are allocated as follows:

• AO1 10 marks: linguistic labelling and application of language frameworks (plus some consideration of your written accuracy - spelling, grammar and structure)
• AO3 15 marks: engagement with meaning (what the texts are about and how they represent their subject matter); how contexts influence the texts (time, speaker identity, place, mode, genre); how writers and speakers address and engage their audiences (positioning, address, audience assumptions)
• AO2 20 marks: understanding of language concepts (your knowledge of change & variation overviews, your understanding of case studies, research, examples, theories and debates)

AO2 is the big one here and you can improve your mark on AO2 if you bear a few things in mind:

• Knowing lots of things is good, but use them to answer the question. Don't try to cram in everything you've read about Samuel Johnson, William Caxton and Robert Lowth. Synthesise the key patterns from the past and see how they relate to the texts you're presented with in the exam.
• Explain any case studies and research that you refer to. It's not helpful to an examiner for you to refer to something by the researchers' names only and then not to explain what their research showed or how it might be relevant.
• Be clear about wider debates about usage. Mugging up on Jean Aitchison's characterisation of prescriptive models is helpful, but look elsewhere too.
• Make sure you are aware of how language changes spread and the patterns of change that can be observed. The section in the A2 textbook about the wave model, s-curve, substratum and random fluctuation theories is important here. Think too about having a look at this post about the "heartbeat" model of change.
• Have clear examples to illustrate theories. Try to keep up to date with examples of (say) new words, semantic changes to existing words and different supra-regional varieties of English. Here's where your textbook is less use. Try to find examples from posts like this and this and sites like this.
• For question 3 on Language Discourses, it's a really good idea to get some wider reading done well before the exam. This well help you out a great deal. Try Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars, Deborah Cameron's The Myth of Mars and Venus and David Crystal's The Fight For English if you want to read accessible and interesting books about big debates in English Language. Use Emagazine too to supplement your reading. There are some articles in last year's editions aimed specifically at the Language Discourses question on ENGA3.

In the next post on ENGA3 exam preparation, I'll try to have a look at AO3 and how to pick up marks by actually talking about what the texts are about and how ideas are represented.

National Grammar Day

It's National Grammar Day in the USA on March 4th, and this webpage has lots more information about it is being celebrated. Among my favourites are the Correct the Celebrity classroom task in which you spot the grammatical errors in Justin Timberlake lyrics, Paris Hilton's blogs and various film titles, although I'm saddened by the fact that we can't just put a big red ring around Paris Hilton herself and fail her.

There are some good tips on writing clearly, some myths exploded about "bad" grammar, and overall it's good clean fun. It veers a little towards the prescriptive for my tastes (Why's there no discussion about dialect forms, for example?), but you can't win 'em all.

Learning the language/s

The ways in which children acquire language have been thoroughly researched for the best part of a century now, and even before people like Piaget, Vygotsky and Chomsky arrived on the scene, there were many observations about how children picked up (or didn't pick up) features of language, and the issue exercised the minds of great thinkers such as Kant and Plato.

More recently, studies have tended to become more intensive and involve masses more data than the earlier studies which often consisted of researchers tracking their own kids' development (or in my case publicly humiliating my children by showing clips of them to my classes or writing about them in the textbook) . The Deb Roy study at MIT which was featured in the BBC Horizon Programme Why Do We Talk (see here and here for links and further reading) showed how huge amounts of data could be collected by filming a child through CCTV for literally years, and then processing that data to see exactly what happened when.

This study shows how another large scale investigation is shedding light on the acquisition of Standard English and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) in children. The findings, as reported in Science Daily, show that African-American children arrive at school with quite a high incidence of vernacular features in their speech. This then drops off as they go through the first four years of school before spiking again at the end of elementary school and dipping as the children enter high school.

The article suggests that there are implications in these findings for the teaching of Standard English in schools, which might well be the case, but it would also appear that the data tells us a bit more about how young people feel about themselves and their vernacular forms as they get older. Language is of course part of a wider system of social signification as well as a set of words and structures to be acquired, so it's quite likely that as children get older their relationship with their own language will change, and as the research seems to suggest this isn't a regular, smooth process but one that goes in peaks and troughs.

It's interesting to see how children start to pick up slang from their peer group at school as they get older and how this sits with the different varieties of English they hear around them - at school and at home -  so it's no surprise that a variety as well-established and widely used in the USA as AAVE will go through cycles as its users negotiate the complex territory of age, ethnicity, individual identity and mainstream, standard language forms.

One of the implications for English teaching might be that studying AAVE (or in the case of the UK, British Black English and other dialects or sociolects) alongside the Standard forms helps to develop a better understanding of both forms and their suitability for different situations. After all, what is being talked about here is quite a positive thing: being fluent in two languages/ codes rather than just one.

Other research into bilingualism in the early years of childhood would seem to suggest that having two or more languages around you is actually a very positive thing, leading to enhanced flexibility in thinking and even health benefits in later years:

Studies of children who grow up as bilingual speakers indicate they are often better at perspective-taking tasks, such as prioritizing, than monolingual children. Experiments with older bilingual speakers indicate that the enhanced mental skills may protect them from problems associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

So, as the report puts it, "juggling" two languages helps in many ways, and that doesn't just apply to recognised languages but also varieties of languages.

(If you can get hold of Graeme Trousdale's chapter Variation and Education in Analysing Variation in English (eds.Maguire, Warren & McMahon, April) you can find a clear explanation of how studying non-standard varieties is actually very good for our understanding of grammar in general, and helps with our grasp of standard forms too.)

Word formation processes and language change

This piece by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionary Blog is worth a look if you're trying to come up with examples of recently created new words. As he points out, with words like staycation and daycation, many of these new words are the result of similar processes, in this case the blending of  whole words or elements of existing words, so stay + vacation = staycation, while day + vacation = daycation.

You can also see some examples of new words that relate to specific events, such as flunami ("an extremely large increase in the number of people suffering from flu" formed by flu + tsunami) being linked to the recent spike in flu cases, while snowpocalypse (snow + apocalypse), snowmageddon (snow + armageddon) and blizzaster (blizzard + disaster) all relate to the USA's recent bad weather and increasingly inventive ways to describe its magnitude.

Of course, as we find ever more inventive ways to express the size of something massive, the original words that used to mean that something was impressive or big tend to get bleached, losing their power and forcing us to find an expression that's more powerful.

Don't be a mooncalf: learn some new (and old) words

If you're feeling a bit angry or irritated with someone, but are bored of using the same old words to describe them, why not flex your lexis and pick up a whole new vocabulary? It's fun and easy if you go to this link on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary site, and you'll be told a bit about each word too.

If you are interested in recent entries to various dictionaries, this link is helpful. Included among the latest entries are the blend Belieber (believer + Bieber), the intejection ew, which signifies disgust and should appear very close to Bieber's name every time it appears, and oneversation (a blend of one and conversation) which refers to a conversation where the other party doesn't listen to a word you say.

The American Dialect Society voted app as its word of the year for 2010. Which would be great if I had an i-Phone but I don't.