Due date: Tuesday Jan. 25 before class. Bring your printout to discuss in class and to hand in. I need both an upload and a printout. I will be using some of the data that you find to illustrate points from subsequent chapters.
Honor Code guidelines for this assignment: Do your own work. You can talk about the assignment generally but don't use examples that others found. Be sure to follow the guidelines also for appropriate use of the internet for this assignment. Don't use ESL sites for this assignment. (Later, we may use such sites, for data or examination of particular statements about language.)
Part I.
Grammaticality; syntax in world English varieties; grammar pet peeves.
For I.1- 3, use the internet as instructed but use your own direct observations about grammatical features, not those that have been described online or discussed on ESL (English as a Second Language) sites.
1. Search out on the internet or in other written communications 3 sentences that you believe are ungrammatical, and list the sentences along with the genre in which they were used. (e.g. chatroom; internet forum; online newspaper; etc.) The sentences you find should have something wrong with them besides word choice. What part(s) of each of the three sentences is ungrammatical? Why do you consider it ungrammatical? By what kind of rules is it ungrammatical? Correct all the ungrammatical parts and put the sentences into Standard English.
2. Find web editions of newspapers that are in English, but from a different part of the world from North America or Britain. (See page 10 under problem 6 for a few links to such web editions.)) Find 2 sentences from one or more of these editions with what appear to be syntactic differences from Standard English. (whether British or American.) Briefly describe what is different about these sentences syntactically. (Focus on particular grammatical features.)
3. Many people are annoyed by particular things about the way other people speak or write English. Sometimes the annoyances are about particular word choices, but very often they have to do with grammar, and perceived common violations of grammatical rules. Examples:
-
"Split infinitive":
"Obama Win allows some to finally feel American". (headline from web newspaper) - Use of who for whom:
"Who did you get it from?"
We can call a habitual annoyance about a particular grammatical feature a "grammar pet peeve" or just "pet peeve" for short. Think of 3 pet peeves besides those above that you or someone you know has about English grammar and find examples to illustrate them. You can get the examples from language use you find on the web or something you heard someone or various people say. If you take an internet example, it should be taken from a web page not about English or grammar, i.e. an example that you found from language use 'in the wild'. Ideally you should find examples in the ordinary course of your reading on the web. Spoken language examples should be as close to what you heard as possible.
Note: Often people hear professors or other students say things in class that have structures of interest in them, and type them quickly into their computer so they have a record of it; others write utterances they find grammatically noteworthy in a notebook. These ways of collecting spoken data are excellent not only for noting your own pet peeves, but also can serve as data for interesting issues in English grammar that we can discuss in class. Feel free to bring strange or tricky examples, or those whose structures you are not clear on, to class for analysis. Date of utterance and situation of utterance are typically also recorded when you record linguistic data. The situation gives us information about the genre of the example. (e.g. class lecture; conversation among peers; etc.)
Part II
Exercises from Huddleston and Pullum (the textbook):
Subject vs. Predicate; Noun Phrases and their functions; Parts of Speech (= Part of Speech Categories, Syntactic Categories)
For II.1-3, Do the first three exercises on pp. 27-28.
1. i-v (don't forget the last one, top of page 28)
2. i-v
3. i-v
© 2007-2011 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 18 Jan 2011