Dr Carmen Ebner

Time 2020-12-14 09:03:29

Web Name: Dr Carmen Ebner

WebSite: http://properenglishusage.com

ID:133694

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The Author Carmen Ebner Carmen Ebner is a sociolinguist. In September 2017, she has obtained her PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) in the Netherlands, where she worked on a project on language attitudes and prescriptivism in British English. Carmen's research interests include all things sociolinguistics. In particular, she is interested in linguistic discrimination, attitude elicitation techniques, language variation and change, and historical sociolinguistics. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom. Well, to be precise in a classroom not as a lecturer. It’s a bit of an odd feeling, but also quite relaxing. For the past three weeks, I have participated in a training programme at Queen Mary University of London called QConsult. In this programme, PhDs and Post-Docs get the chance to experience a career outside academia as QConsultants. One of the perks of this programme is its interdisciplinary nature. PhD candidates from the School of Medicine and Dentistry work together with PhDs in English and Post-Docs in Engineering to solve a problem for a real client. Even though we come from different disciplines, our cohort has something crucial in common: a curiosity to experience life outside academia.Having applied for this opportunity with a quite frankly very, very vague idea in mind about what a consultant does and what consultancy is, I have already learned a lot in this short time. Not just about what I’m actually supposed to be doing in this 12-week programme, but also about my skills and my personality.Week 2, for instance, was a revelation. Split into two groups, our cohort participated in an assessment centre simulation in a 2 ½ hour session. To make the simulation as realistic as possible, we even had a dress code. Safety goggles were swapped for stilettos, band t-shirts abandoned for crisp white shirts. Everyone felt a bit like a fish out of water. Concerns about appearances were however soon dropped, once we were presented with our case study. In teams of four we had to work through a lengthy document and present our solutions on a poster.The teams were created based on a Myers-Briggs personality test we had to complete prior to the assessment centre. No matter whether you believe in these types of tests or not, I was amazed at how accurate some of the descriptions were. Apparently, I am a protagonist, a natural-born leader like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Daenerys Targaryen and Morpheus, to name just a few. Don’t get me wrong. Reading the first few lines of the introduction made me doubt the results a bit, but then I could see myself more and more in it. Putting this to test in the simulation, my urge to include everyone in the discussion and making sure that the team was happy with the result was pretty apparent. Our performance in our teams was also evaluated and according the feedback I got, I am a collaborative nudger.Today, we received our real project brief and met our team members. Now we get to work as QConsultants testing the non-academia water. Hi, my name is Dr Carmen Ebner and I am a sociolinguist. In particular, I study language variation and change, and focus on language ideologies, prescriptivism and attitudes towards usage problems. At this point, I might have lost some of you. No matter whether you re a linguist or not. Usage problems? Prescriptivism? Really? Is that even genuine research? Don t worry. This blog post isn t a rant. But let me give you a bit more background on usage problems and on what the real problem is.While some of you might have heard of split infinitives, dangling participles, and double negatives, others might only have a vague idea of what these terms mean. Some of you might even have strong opinions on their acceptability. Opinions and knowledge aside, all three of these are prime examples of linguistic features whose standardness has long been disputed. In scientific literature, the split infinitive and its likes are often referred to as usage problems¹. But mind, not every grammar lapse, gaffe and mishap is part of this somewhat mysterious category. What then are usage problems?Essential criteria used to characterise usage problems are their widespread and fairly frequent use as well as being subject to public debate. While these three criteria proposed by Ilson are useful to an extent, they do not go far enough in circumscribing what constitutes a usage problem and what not. To give you an example which you have likely encountered if not even produced yourself, consider langauge.Langauge on TwitterDoing a quick google and corpus search, it seems as if this spelling variant of language is indeed fairly widespread and frequent. Public discussion seems to predominantly take the shape of social media commentary and entries in online wiktionaries. Applying Ilson’s criteria, langauge could thus be classed a usage problem as all three criteria are met.Now let’s compare this to a slightly different linguistic feature: would of. This feature includes the use of of in place of have in modal verb constructions such as would/could/should have. Due to the similarity of the two words – ‘ve and of – when spoken, the use of would of has unsurprisingly become frequent and widespread in writing as well. The main difference between the two examples I am using here lies in the public discussion. While public discussions on langauge often stress the ordinariness of this misspelling and convey a humorous note, thus lessening the perceived severity of this misspelling, the discourse evolving around would of is strikingly different and without question more negative. Modal verb constructions such as would of seem to be condemned as outright incorrect simply because of is also a preposition.Reddit user: If you do this, we are enemies Without doubt public discussion plays a vital role in the perception of stigmatised and alleged nonstandard linguistic features and thus also in the circumscription of this group of features. There is a particular subgroup of usage problems which has acquired some notoriety or almost mythological status over the course of time. The split infinitive is part of this subgroup and is often referred to as an old chestnut or a Zombie rule, as aptly described by Arnold Zwicky. Having gained some prominence among the general public, Zombie rules are recurring components in advice literature on how to use English properly. While there are some excellent linguistic contributions² to this genre, these efforts are, unfortunately, few and far between. The lack of such studies debunking usage myths and investigating the perceptions and attitudes of the general public facilitates and perpetuates the status of linguistic features as stigmatised, incorrect, improper and nonstandard linguistic features. It is not difficult to see a link between the usage guide market being dominated by often self-appointed language experts and guardians of the English language and apparently undying Zombie rules finding their way back to the speech community.So, what’s the problem? The problem at hand is not the existence of alleged usage problems such as the split infinitive, dangling participles, double negatives or would of. The issue lies more with the mostly half-hearted engagement and treatment of prescriptivism by linguists. In the past six years, attitudes towards stigmatised linguistic features such as the ones mentioned in this blog post have been the centre of my research focus and interests. Even though every linguist (I would hedge this with almost, but I am sure it s every) has an opinion on prescriptivism and usage problems, the subject is still widely treated like a pariah in the discipline³. Every now and again, I earn somewhat belittling smiles and raised eyebrows from colleagues when sharing my research interests, as if studying prescriptivism is like committing high treason against linguistics. As if this was only a legitimate pastime for an armchair grammarian. Stubborn as I am, I refuse to accept this. To research language and, especially as a sociolinguist, how it is used by its speakers and works in society are fundamentals on which linguistics is based. After all, shouldn t linguists describe all aspects of language and discourse?¹Ilson, R. (1985). Usage problems in British and American English. In S. Greenbaum (ed.), The English Language Today. Oxford: The Pergamon Press. 166-182.² See for instance Peters, P. (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: CUP.³ Don t get me wrong, there are wonderful linguists out there working on prescriptivism in different varieties. It s been a while since I ve shared some research news, let alone written a blog post. In an endeavour to regain some of my confidence as a researcher and human being (I’m sure a lot of us have fallen prey to the imposter syndrome and the somewhat unexpected early mid-life crisis at the age of 30, right?), I am on the search to find my place and voice again. In the past two years, I’ve completed my PhD project on attitudes towards stigmatised language features in British English, moved from Leiden, the Netherlands, to London, and started to work as a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. While my job mainly involves teaching duties, I have had the chance to work on some publications, present my findings at lecturers, workshops and conferences, and start new research projects of which you’ll read more about on this blog soon.My passion for teaching and research has led me to blindly idealise academia for a long time. But things are far from perfect. Job instability has undoubtedly had an impact on my well-being. Although I am not saying “Auf Wiedersehen” to academia, I am exploring all options. In academia as well as outside academia. In Great Britain and abroad. On this blog, I’ll report on my findings from these explorations in the hope that they might help the one or the other who is struggling with finding their place as well.Now don’t abandon this blog just yet, if you are only interested in the latest prescriptivism talk. Rest assured, there will be plenty of it on here. After all, that’s my specialty. So, I hope you bear with me and my rusty blogging skills. I am sure blogging is like riding a bike. It just takes courage to get back on it. Read my blog post on the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog: Pullum takes on Strunk againBridging the UnbridgeableFor readers of this blog and those who have followed the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists closely, it’s hardly surprising to hear that Geoffrey Pullum, Professor of General Linguistics at Edinburgh University, is not particularly fond of William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, to say the least. Pullum has made no secret of his disapproval of the advice provided by Strunk. Describing Strunk’s advice as ranging from “limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense”, Pullum takes a firm stance against The Elements of Style, which, he argues, has enjoyed great popularity on American campuses. (Read his full comments here.)Now Pullum has taken on Strunk again on The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Dracula, Strunk, and Correct English Usage“, Pullum illustrates Strunk’s “limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense” on the basis of literary evidence found in the usage of Strunk’s contemporaries. Bram Stoker’s classic novel View original post 137 more words Standard Fresh from the (online) press: Prescriptive attitudes to EnglishBridging the UnbridgeableToday, we found out that our article “Prescriptive attitudes to English” is published, that it has been out for two months already. Thanks, Carmen, for tweeting about it, or I wouldn’t have known. Still, I’m really pleased, and expect Carmen will be, too: it is as interactive as we could make it, with loads of links (lots of prescriptivism goodies), and of course plenty of interesting (we hope!) content. We hope it will be widely read and quoted of course.View original post Standard Check out our programme for the Life after HUGE Symposium! Registration is now open. Bridging the UnbridgeableBelow, you will find the preliminary programme for the symposium Life after HUGE? which will be held on 9 December at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Registration is now open, and you may do so either by leaving a comment to this message or by sending an email to Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (i.m.tieken@hum.leidenuniv.nl). There will be no fee for the conference, so we hope to see as many of you as are interested in the topic.Symposium: Life after HUGE?Speakers:Rebecca Gowers, “Another One?”Why I wanted to write Horrible Words. What I thought I was after. Certain ways in which I know the book failed. Other ways in which I hope it modestly succeeded. How some of the responsibility for all this can be laid at the feet of Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, her colleagues and various of her PhD students. An undertaking never to…View original post 1,708 more words Standard Bridging the UnbridgeableOn 9 December 2016, the Bridging the Unbridgeable project will organise a usage guides symposium at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Speakers will include Rebecca Gowers (author of the revised edition of Plain Words and of the recently published Horrible Words), Oliver Kamm (author of Accidence will Happen), Harry Ritchie (author of English for the Natives) as well as the members of the project, including Robin Straaijer (who recently published a review of the 4th edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage by Jeremy Butterfield). Further details about how to register for the symposium will follow soon.View original post Standard Bridging the UnbridgeableRobin Queen and Julie Boland, both from the University of Michigan, recently conducted a study on attitudes towards spelling variation, which has now been picked up by The Guardian. What they call “typos” and “grammos” are errors everyone has come across when using the internet and computer-mediated communication. Numerous internet memes illustrate computer users’ outrage about spelling mistakes such as the one below. While typos are errors Queen and Boland link to keyboarding issues, such as spelling the as teh , grammos constitute “traditional peever errors that are only relevant in written language”. Thus, a grammo would be the use of to instead of too, for example. Typos are often considered simple mistakes caused by carelessness and rushed typing. Grammos, on the other hand, seem to be evaluated more harshly and to affect the writer’s personality, as the writer’s abilities and knowledge are questioned. Queen and Boland sought to…View original post 272 more words Standard Bridging the UnbridgeableOn our blog, we often report on current developments in the usage debate, bits and pieces of our research findings and also new publications of usage guides. Being a true book addict, I would like to share two of the most recent additions not only to my own personal library but also to the stock of books dealing with the usage debate.The first book is most probably the latest usage guide available at the moment. May I quote you on that? A Guide to Grammar and Usage was published in late 2015 and written by Stephen Spector, a member of the English Faculty of Stony Brook University. His take on English grammar and usage is quite refreshing as he takes a rather descriptive approach to the usage debate, but does not eschew providing his readers with rules of Standard English to follow. What makes this usage guide…View original post 267 more words Standard Bridging the UnbridgeableAs part of our interactive feature series in English Today, the latest and ninth article has been published today in which I discuss attitudes towards the role of the media in language variation and change.In my online questionnaire, I asked informants in Great Britain what they thought of the current state of English and obtained more than 170 answers to this rather general question. Clearly not all of them denounced that the end of English is nigh, but I decided to focus on answers containing a negative outlook on the development of English. I was particularly interested in the numerous answers by informants putting the blame for the alleged doom of the language on the media.Since I would like to investigate this issue further, I launched a survey last December asking for your opinion on this matter. The survey was designed with UK media in mind, which is…View original post 69 more words Standard Privacy Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use. To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

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