English 2810a: Second Essay
Contents
Purpose
The goal of this assignment is to give you an opportunity to apply the grammatical awareness you have received in this course to real-world linguistic situations.
Instructions
Write an essay on some aspect of grammar, dialect, register, and/or idiolect. The following are some suggestions to start your thinking, but feel free to develop your own topic and or approach:
- Literary authors often use non-standard or regional varieties of English in their work. Some times, such authors write entire novels or stories in such varieties; in other cases they also use standard varieties. Discuss the use of such varieties in the work of one or more authors. Some possibilities include:
- Southern (and lower class) and/or Black vs. White English in Huckleberry Finn
- Yoda-speak in the Star Wars series
- Gollum in the work of Tolkien
- The slang dialects (of the future) used in A clockwork orange
- The interaction of standard and regional varieties in the work of Achebe.
- Track your own use of different registers (or that of your friends).
- One method for doing this might be to carry a small tape-recorder with you throughout the the day and tape your self at regular intervals. How does you language differ in speaking to different situations?
- Another method might be to make a list of five or six different situations in which you think you or your friends use different registers. Write a passage in each of these registers and then given them to friends to see if they can distinguish among the registers. What features in your language help most to distinguish among different registers?
- A third possibility is to do the above experiment with several friends: have each person write a passage mimicking how they would speak in different situations, then exchange the passages and have other in the group try to determine what register each person was imitating. What features helps you and your friends distinguish most easily among the different registers.
- Tell a relatively long joke or story to a number of friends from different parts of the country and from other countries (don’t write the joke out for them). Ask them to retell the joke or story to you in them in their own words and record the result. Play the recording to others and ask them to identify the place each speaker comes from. What features in the language of your speakers helps people decide where they come from? In addition to aspects of accent are there any features of grammar you can discover?
- Read the letters-to-the-editor page in the Calgary Sun, Calgary Herald, Lethbridge Herald, Globe and Mail, and New York Times. What types of linguistic features distinguish the different newspapers’ correspondents? Note that you can conduct the same experiment with the columnists in these newspapers: compare columns on similar subject matter in each newspaper; what types of linguistic differences do you see? Are there some subject areas (arts, politics, sports, etc.) where the letters or columnists tend to sound more alike across the newspapers? Are there subjects where they seem more different?
Rubric
For this project, I will be following my standard essay rubric.
