Do the following six exercises. The 3 in Part I are for class
discussion on Aug 23 and Aug 28. The 3 in Part II are to turn in
on Aug. 28. Upload these last 3 in a single Word or .pdf document to Owlspace under
Assignment 1 before class on Aug. 28.
Part I is for class discussion, not to turn in. Due dates given
for each question in this part. Can work together on Part I.
You can use the internet 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.
Part I.
Grammar pet peeves. Grammaticality; syntax in world English varieties.
1. (For Thursday Aug 23 class discussion. You do not have to
submit in writing for this, but bring some notes on these to class
for discussion.)
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 online 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 a number of pet peeves (at least 3) 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. If you give spoken language
examples, they should be as close to what you heard as possible.
Note on data collection: 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.)
2. Find web editions of newspapers that are in English, but from a
different part of the world from North America or Britain. (You can
look at the textbook 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. 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.
Part II
Exercises from Huddleston and Pullum (our textbook). These are to be
written up and submitted Tuesday Aug. 28 before class via Owlspace,
and bring a hardcopy to class. We will go over some of them in
class.
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
© 2007-2012 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 21 Aug 2012