More English invasion?

Earlier this month, I spent about a week in France. It was a very pleasant stay, even with my rather limited French. Because - well, I’ll show you. This is what I saw in Paris (photo taken from Google Search, because I didn't have a camera):

L'OpenTour - 2 day Pass 2 jours. I don't know about you, but I burst into laughter upon seeing this. It's a linguistic Janus. Supreme siamese compromise. The Strait of Dover finally swum through.

Well, this is just one instance; I have seen and heard more English than I had expected in less touristy towns as well.

I was going to jot down a few serious paragraphs about language contact and how all this is related to English education in Japan and so on - but no. The plain fact is, I like it when English simultaneously recoils from and embraces French, just as I like it when French recoils from and embraces English. So I thought I might share the joy with you. 

Linguist Llama

Now editor at TESL Ontario

I've just been given the editorship at TESL Ontario's Contact Magazine. So now the grovelling begins: send me your articles, please. It's not paid, it's not peer reviewed, but it's very much appreciated. I'll also be at the TESL Ontario Conference Thursday and Friday, where I'll be attending the AGM, presenting, and checking out some presentations. I hope to see some of you there.

Direct comprehensive corrective feedback

Although there is a good deal of debate surrounding how teachers should respond to student writing, my sense of the orthodox position is that indirect feedback on only selected points is the preferred type of correction. That is: most writing teachers appear to believe we should focus marking on only certain points, and we should give only hints such as vt for verb tense rather than providing the target forms to the students.

Happy dictionary day!

October 16th is dictionary day in celebration of the birthday of Noah Webster, he of the famous American English dictionary. But you can celebrate any dictionary you want.

Government of Canada to change language test

In a bulletin posted yesterday, the Canadian Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration gave "notice requesting comments on a proposal to require applicants to furnish upfront evidence of language ability showing achievement of at least Canadian Language Benchmark level 4 in speaking and listening with their citizenship application." The intention seems reasonable: to change from a multiple choice print test to a test more directly assessing speaking and listening. The devil will, of course, be in the details.

They are considering as system in which "administrative guidelines would provide a list of preferred language tests which are correlated with the Canadian Language Benchmarks." The problem with this is that “the benchmarks (levels) have not been empirically validated to ensure the fit of each descriptor with its level” (Vandergrift, 2006). It's hard to find tests, then, that correlate with something that doesn't itself correlate well with different language levels. At least, though, the purpose of the CLBs was specifically to address the language needs of newcomers to Canada.

There have, however, been some recent changes to the CLBs, which are being presented at next week's TESL Ontario conference. I'm planning to attend those sessions, so maybe I'll have some good news.

'Who' and 'do' insertion

I've got a new "Grammarology 2.0" column up over at the TESL Toronto blog. This time, I try to help out a correspondent after someone told her that we can’t use do, does, did after who.

Seasonal deixis

Yesterday, I mentioned on Google+ that my grade-five son has a piece about horsehair worms coming out in the spring issue of Kiddo Magazine. Peter van der Woude commented, "Great" and then went on to wonder, "why do Americans always seem to insist on using the seasons to inform about schedules & releases?" continuing, "I've never heard anyone in Australia announce something as `released this Autumn' or `the Summer edition' unless it's related to sports - where the season is obvious."

A word for the problem

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon has been bemoaning the fact that current economics students don't know much about Bayesian methods. He suggests that this is a case of hysteresis, a new word for me. According to the current Wikipedia entry,

 Hysteresis is the dependence of a system not just on its current environment but also on its past.


Stephen observes, "Students who aren't taught Bayesian methods almost never make the effort to learn enough to teach it when they go on to become professors." This is exactly the situation we see with English grammar: Students who aren't taught modern grammatical theory almost never make the effort to learn enough to teach it when they go on to become teachers.

Having a name for something doesn't really change much, but it's fun to know nonetheless.

Defunctionalizing nouns and verbs

The NYT's blog `The Learning Network' is looking at words that are both noun and verb.

Overview | In this lesson, students play with words that can function either as nouns or verbs, depending on context.

The idea here is good, but the wording is unfortunate. Words don't `function as' nouns or verbs; that would be like saying I function as a male or a particular animal functions as a dog. Rather, the words are both nouns and verbs. You could also say they belong to both categories.

When we start to talk about function, now we're into the territory of subjects, objects, modifiers, complements, etc. If you want to dig deeper, have a look at these tree diagrams with a complete list of categories and a complete list of functions.

Demise of google labs

I was watching a presentation last night, part of which was musing about the feeling that no new music genre had appeared for quite some time and, well, I kind of lost the plot after that because I started thinking about how I could check out the rise and fall of different genres using language. I started thinking that I would use Google sets to generate a list of genres and then I'd look at the frequency with which they appear in the Google books corpus over time.

But this morning, when I went to Google sets, it was gone. Not only that, but it seems that the entire Google Labs enterprise is not long for this world. This was announced about two months ago, but nobody told me about it. Anyhow, anybody know a replacement for Google sets?

40 fascinating lectures for linguistics geeks

From Zoran Nesic through Google+. These lectures could potentially eat up a lot of my marking time.

Grammarology 2.0: Linking verbs

My first real Grammarology 2.0 column is up on TESL Toronto's website. As promised in the introduction, it's another look at what constitutes a "linking verb".

Previous English, Jack posts related to linking verbs:
The categorization of so 
The state of linking verbs

Grammarology 2.0

I've started a new column for TESL Toronto which will run roughly twice a month. In it, I’ll tackle grammar questions from two viewpoints: traditional school grammar, and a more modern analysis following The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). The introduction is now online.

Google ngrams and TED

You've seen my TED talk using the Google ngram viewer, and now here's another, this time by the authors of the culturomics paper, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. It keeps things pretty light, but the suppression of Chagall's name in the German corpus during the Nazi period was interesting.

`I' vs `the'

In the Sept 3-9th edition of New Scientist, James Pennebaker discusses the individual variations in frequency with which we use pronouns and other small words, and he considers what this metric might say about our personalities and relationships. The paper version (p. 45) has a graph entitled "The real word count" with the caption "The 20 most frequently used words in the English language, across both spoken and written texts." The graph shows that I is the most common word, followed closely by the.

This prompted the following query by Mike Scott to the Corpora mailing list:

"I wrote to the author, James Pennemaker of the U of Texas, about this, expressing my surprise at the pronoun I having greater frequency than THE, as even in the spoken-only section of the BNC (10m words) we find I occurring only just over half as often as THE. His data contains a mix of spoken and written with a large amount of blog data. He reports that with all his studies in the USA and Mexico, "people always use more I more than THE. It's never close." Can anyone help here, clearing up the position? Someone with access to a really top quality corpus, more up to date and representative than the BNC? "

"World's first" English language learning chatbot

This video is actually posted on the website of the company hawking this "service". Incredibly, they're charging people to put themselves through this kind of torture.

Language Learner Literature Award Winners

The first extensive reading world congress that wrapped up last weekend in Kyoto was, from all reports, a great success despite the typhoon. The ER Foundation has been posting videos of many of the talks on their YouTube channel.

The winners of the 2011 Language Learner Literature Awards were also announced, and the results are now up on their website. I've reproduced them below:

Self control and Google Ngram Viewer

In the New York Times Sunday book review, Steven Pinker reviews Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, a book that was already on my to-read list after the recent summary. In doing so, Pinker writes,

"Nonetheless, the very idea of self-­control has acquired a musty Victorian odor. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase rose in popularity through the 19th century but began to free fall around 1920 and cratered in the 1960s, the era of doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and taking a walk on the wild side."

Being the anal fact-checking type I am, I went straight to the Google Books Ngram Viewer and searched for self-control. Nothing. Not a single hit, which is rather strange since the hyphenated version is not so uncommon. But after playing around a bit, I found that the Ngram viewer seems to have some problems with hyphens. So here's the graph of the frequency of self control sans hyphen.

From this graph, it seems Pinker is about a decade early in diagnosing free-fall, and getting on 20 years late in placing the crater. In fact, by the late sixties, self control had gained back a good deal of its losses, and Pinker doesn't mention that by 2000 we were back near historical highs. 

Maybe he's looking at a different graph. Perhaps he had more success with the hyphenated version, or he might be looking at one of the sub-corpora, say American English, or the English One Million. But none of the other graphs seem to match his description either. In fact, the British English graph tells a completely different story:

As I pointed out in my TEDx talk in June, even if we date the changes accurately, it's really not clear what fluctuations in the frequency of a particular phrase would mean. It would depend on many things including the change in popularity of synonyms (e.g., self restraint, willpower, etc.). It could indicate a shift in the frequency of the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spellings. And people can use self control both approvingly and dis-.  

Despite the trouble with interpreting changes in word frequency over time, though, I predict that there will be a rise in the frequency of this trope in the media.

New Grammar App from Bas Aarts and Survey of English Usage

Here's the press release:

The Survey of English Usage at UCL is very pleased to announce the publication of a new App for Apple hand-held devices such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The interactive Grammar of English (iGE) is a complete course in English grammar written for first year undergraduates, students at high schools and teachers of the English language. For more information see the iGE website.