More on semicolons

Mark Davies has fixed the COCA and COHA, so I can now look more closely at historical uses of semicolons. Click here for a chart. It tells pretty much the same story as yesterday's post, but you can click it and find the actual usages from each decade (or even year if you care to drill down that far).

Enumerating the semicolon

The semicolon has an interesting history, which is traced rather well by Paul Collins in his 2008 Slate article. I thought I'd go back and have another look at some of the numbers, which can now be calculated with somewhat better reliability. 

This graph demonstrates the rise and fall of the semicolon in English. Its popularity peaked right around 1800 at just shy of 1% of the words. That is to say there were almost 10,000 semicolons per million words. That's a little more common than is is today.

Frequency of semicolon use (Source: Google Books Ngram viewer)

Train your brain to be a memory athlete

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article by Joshua Foer on memory training. It documents how he went from a reporter looking for a story to a participant to a the new U.S. record holder in speed cards (a memory event in which you memorize the order of a deck of cards as fast as you can).

The method he uses is the art of memory, roughly the method of loci combined with dramatic images. He mentions Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, an interview with whom you can see here. In the interview, you can see how Chooi makes connections between sounds and images.

Prescriptivist Today

If you are reading this, then you may be interested in Deborah Schaffer's article that appeared in a recent issue of English Today, entitled 'Old whine online: prescriptive grammar blogs on the Internet'. I'll say no more; go ahead and take a look if you haven't: here is a link to the journal article, and here is a direct link to the article itself in PDF.

Semantic Categories and Context in L2 Vocabulary Learning

In one of my earliest posts, I discusses how the fine work of Endel Tulving has been misunderstood by many in ESL, leading to vocabulary lessons that group semantically related words together. This is a problem because, as I wrote at the time, the semantic connections can cause the individual concepts to lose distinctness, leading the learner to confuse which word stood for which concept.

A study just published in Language Learning (online) has looked again at this issue in an interesting way and, while supporting this main conclusion, that semantic connections can lead to confusion, also might have run afoul of the same mistake in reasoning described above. Here's the abstract:

David Paul's blog

David Paul has done, perhaps, more than other single person in the last decade else to support English teachers and English teaching in Japan. Now he's started a new blog. In his first post, he talks about his creative process in writing textbook dialogue.

What's the plural of Prius?

Toyota is asking what the plural of Prius is, and they've got a catchy video to go along with the question:

Adjectives and past participles

Returning to Leo Schmitt's most recent Grammatically Speaking column, I'd like to take up the issue of when a past participle becomes an adjective. This point comes up in the "Brain Teaser" section:

The following two sentences are grammatical. They both demonstrate the same exception to a general grammatical rule of English. What is that rule and what is the exception?

1. The Natchez Board of Aldermen last week voted unanimously to demolish the collapsed building at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin streets. (From “City to demolish collapsed building in downtown,” The Natchez Democrat.)

2. Authorities believe an escaped convict on work release ... is responsible for the blaze. (From “Investigators believe escaped convict set Roan Mountain fire,” www.tricities.com.)

Guest post from Leo Schmitt

The following is a guest post from Leo Schmitt, the new Grammatically Speaking columnist whose column I complained about here.

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It is nice to know I can count on one regular reader, even if you are only looking for fodder with which to excoriate me. As I have already received some considerable flack from the more 'traditionalist' side, it is a relief to know that I can also count on criticism from supporters of alternative approaches to analyzing grammatical structures.

Intentional misunderstanding as a self-aggrandization strategy

In today's Retail, Val nicely explain's Grice's cooperative principle.

Grammatically speaking, the zombie edition

Grammatically speaking is dead. If only...

Back in September, it was announced that Richard Firsten would stop publishing his monthly column for TESOL. After years pointing out his mistakes, I thought this might be good news. When he let on that the column would not die, but that it would be incarnated by T. Leo Schmitt instead, I was cautiously optimistic. It turns out, though, that Schmitt is little better than Firsten.

Language Corpse/Corpus

Ever heard of the 'Bad Writing Contest'? If you haven't, take a look. It really is wonderfully amusing and amazing.

We are accustomed to seeing linguistic studies/analyses based on large corpora. We hear so much about word frequencies and collocations and all the rest. But we hardly, if ever, hear about what makes writing good or bad, based on solid, scientific linguistic studies, while we can tell bad from good writing with relative ease. There must be something there waiting to be explored ...

Meanwhile, the Bad Writing Contest: guaranteed to make you laugh out loud, and perhaps make you think too.

Google reading level

Google advanced search now has a reading-level feature which groups search results in to basic, medium, and advanced reading levels. According to Nudu, a Google employee, 

"The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced."

It seems unlikely that this will be of much value to English language learners, but it seems worth trying out. Here's this blog's breakdown by level.

Award-winning Whodunit

Hugh and Al Graham-Marr are friends from my Japan days who started up a publishing company called Abax. This year, they published Fiction In Action: Whodunit by Adam Gray and Marcos Benevides, which recently won the Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Award for 2010. The book is also notable as possibly the first commercial ELT text to also be published and made available for free under a Creative Commons license.

The subjunctive from the mouthes of babes?

My six-year-old daughter told us at dinner the other day that her teacher generally allows her class certain privileges "if we be good." The first thing that struck me is that it sounds like the subjunctive. An example would be If we be faithful to Christ, he will certainly be faithful to us from the New American Standard Bible. This seems extremely unlikely since it's an archaic form, although you can see how it would have come about. Other verbs appear in the plain present tense here, which is identical in shape to the subjunctive; both use the base form; only be has a distinct first-person present-tense form. This is probably, then, a performance error stemming from mistaken analogy.

The second was that if we be good gives be a dynamic sense that if we are good simply wouldn't have. It sounds much better than, for example, if we be hungry. Consider that you can say we're being good where you can't say *we're being hungry (unless this is some kind of dramatization of hunger).

After we adults had discussed the grammatical implications for a few minutes, my daughter said, "Oh, I mean if we are good," which I found somehow both wonderful and regrettable.

What's up?

A correspondent writes,

"What's up?" and " Not much?" come from African-American hoods... Teaching such phrases to kids is not appropriate, I believe. They will sound "Black". I am 46 years old. When I came up, we, African-Americans, were the only ones using such phrases.

This is a variation of the recency illusion. In fact, the phrase is well over a hundred years old and can be found all over the English speaking world.

TESL programs

Mariola O'Brien, one of my students from a few years back, was written up in the Toronto Star recently. The article doesn't seem to be online, but here's a PDF. It discusses her enviable work situation in Sweden as well as a variety of TESL certification options here in the GTA.

Good Reads

Carol Goar in yesterday's Toronto Star highlights a series of books for adult literacy learners. The series is published by Grass Roots Press and the books are by the following respected Canadian novelists: Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Rabindranath Maharaj, Louise Penny, Maureen Jennings, and Deborah Ellis, and financial writer Gail Vaz-Oxlade. I haven't had a chance to read any, but I look forward to reviewing them and perhaps getting them into our library. The series is set to be expanded by six new books next year.

On the same publisher's website, I also found series designed along similar concepts from British authors (Quick Reads) and Irish authors (Open Door). No doubt there is more to explore.

TESOL Position Statement on the Acquisition of Academic Proficiency in English at the Postsecondary Level

The international language teaching association TESOL has adopted a position which basically says, if you're going to fund an English language learner to go to college or university in English, you'd better be prepared to pay for them to work on their English. Indeed, English studies should not be seen as some kind of remediation, but as an "academic subject on par with other academic classes in an institution."

Saving savings

In the second half of Jan Freeman's most recent "The word", she takes on the question of whether we will be shifting to daylight saving time or daylight savings time. This is a question I took up three years ago here, concluding that both were perfectly grammatical although the singular version is more likely (and is the official choice).