pupoture

As you'll no doubt have studied on this course, descriptivists  describe  language while prescriptivists  prescribe , telling us what we should (or shouldn't) be doing with language. After (nearly) two years of language study, you'll probably have got the general idea that we (your teachers) would prefer you to be descriptive rather than prescriptive about language. That's not (necessarily) because we want you in some kind of liberal-leftie lockstep in which anything goes, but because if you're studying language you really need to be able to do better than just say "I don't like X and that's why you shouldn't use it" (where X is vocal fry, 'Americanisms', rising intonation, 'like', (non-literal) 'literally' or 'bae'... Ok scrub that, no one should say 'bae'). Overall, what I think we want you to avoid is knee-jerk prescriptivism. And that doesn't mean you can't challenge language change and/or l...

Language debates are all over the media again and rarely seem to be too far aware, which is great news if you are an A level English Language student and looking for material to analyse, ideas to glean and references to add to your notes. This article from Christian Rudder in The Huffington Post offers an analysis of Twitter language in response to the perception that social networking is degrading and/or destroying the English language. It's a common argument and one that has been knocking around for centuries. Ever since there has been technology to communicate - the pencil, the printing press, the mobile phone - there has been someone complaining about its disastrous effects on English. This article challenges the declinist discourse and suggests that far from dumbing us down and forcing us to communicate very little in 140 characters, Twitter is not that different to other forms of communication: A team at Arizona State was able to reach beyond word count and length, and into...

And another quick link to a BBC Radio 4 Today clip about the changing language of children . Here, the OUP language expert Sam Armstrong and comedian & writer Charlie Higson discuss the influence of popular culture and video gaming on young people's language. While the presenter is keen to get them moaning about young children using terms like minion , nether , LOL and OMG , the experts are good at seeing the benefits to young people of new forms of language and their ability to code-switch. Take that, Radio 4 curmudgeons! Nice stuff on lexis, morphology, word formation processes and the joys of technology, too.

Just a quick link to a potential Language Discourses argument about the use of literally and beyond (as in "It was beyond awful") from Radio 4's Today programme . Warning! For listeners of a sensitive disposition and sound mind, Simon Heffer is featured.

In an interesting profile of the linguist Geoff Pullum, the Daily Telegraph's Tom Chivers takes a look at the arguments that still rage around the 'rules' of English. For any of you working on ENGA3 Language Discourses, it's a good read, particularly from about halfway through where Pullum outlines his views on the role of linguists in studying how people in the real world use language and how this contrasts with those prescriptive grammarians who pronounce from on high with little grasp of what language actually does. Whenever linguists point out that the rules of language can’t be what the “grammar Nazis” think they are, people claim that they’re saying anything goes. Not at all, says Pullum. “We grammarians who study the English language are not all bow-tie-wearing martinets, but we’re also not flaming liberals who think everything should be allowed. There’s a sensible middle ground where you decide what the rules of Standard English are, on the basis...

If you are studying Language Change or Language Discourses for either AQA A or B A2 English Language, a recent run of articles should be really helpful to you. One of the big debates - probably the biggest, overarching debate of all - connected to this topic is over the ways in which people view language change. Is it a downward spiral of decline or a natural process of evolution and progression? As you might expect, it's rarely a simple answer and opinions are often divided. For members of the declinist to-hell-in-a-handcart brigade (aka the prescriptivists ), like Simon Heffer and Lynne Truss, our language (usually ours , not theirs ) is permanently at risk from the eroding winds of change and the tides of textual degradation. In a recent piece for The Daily Telegraph (which you'll be reading/working on now if you're in one of my A2 classes), Lynne Truss bemoaned what she saw as the increasingly blurred distinction between single and compound words such as any way / anyw...

Fresh from his appearance at the Conservative Party conference , where he angrily denounced "trendy teaching" and "hip hop Hamlet" productions as "viciously racist", while (not so freshly) trotting out a tired Stevie Wonder joke, Lindsay Johns made an appearance on Radio 4's Four Thought programme, with a 15 minute attack on his old favourite, "ghetto grammar" .  We've looked at Johns' arguments about this subject - the need for Standard English and the dangers of street slang to inner city youths - on this blog before and, to be honest, much of what he says in the Four Thought lecture is a slightly reheated version of his older articles which you can find here and here . Unlike Johns, who sees the issue in stark terms - Standard English = good, slang = bad - the issue is more complicated than he suggests. I think he probably realises that, but why let research, reality and facts gets in the way of a good rant? And hey, it seems to ...

Last time there was a teachers' strike, I put the blog on strike for a day; this time round, I've decided not to. I'm on strike but have decided that the blog is a labour of love, for which I get no payment, and anyway, I update it so infrequently at the moment that nobody would be able to tell it's on strike. A bit like my teaching, in fact... Anyway, today's post is a quick one about the rules of grammar - which ones to worry about and which ones not to - by The Guardian's Style Guide author David Marsh . In it he deals with some of the arguments people have about things like split infinitives, starting sentences with conjunctions, who/whom and all the rest of it. It's a particularly useful article for A2 students looking at ENGA3 and Language Discourses, but is also handy for anyone who cares about writing clearly and how clarity can be improved with a a bit of careful thought.

For those of you revising for the ENGA3 exam next Monday, there have been some really good recent examples of articles that focus on attitudes to language use and abuse. A few of these have featured on the @EngLangBlog twitter feed , so thanks to the various teachers and students who alerted me to them. Last year's ENGA3 paper featured a Section B question all about the Queen's English Society and their prescriptivist views about language. Some really on-the-ball students - readers of this blog, no doubt ;-) - managed to mention the demise of the QES as reported here in their answers to the June exam: exactly the kind of contemporary reference that always impresses examiners. The recent articles that you might like to have a look at all take a look at how people feel about the ways in which language changes. In this one , Steven Poole looks at how the internet has both spawned linguistic development and, for some at least, linguistic abominations such as LOL and bad spelling. ...