Fill in the blanks - how word choices convey attitudes

This is an interactive article from the Guardian exploring the attitudes hidden in word choices regarding immigration issues.

Finer points of grammar - are they nonsense?

Stephen Pinker (brilliant - check out his stuff on Youtube or get your hands on his books) writes in this article that many grammar rules that prescriptivists say should not be broken are 'up for discussion'.

I have one issue with what he says; in the middle of the article, he talks about the famous criticism of ridiculous grammar rules ("This is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.") and reprases it to end with the preposition 'up', saying that that is grammatically correct... but if you keep the verb phrase 'to put up with' together, you end up with 'This is the kind of pedantry which I will not put up with.' Which actually sounds better to me than his alternative but is it as grammatically correct?

Be prepared to read this in several installments to make the most of the gems within.

Exam results

Congratulations if you're happy, don't worry if you're not - these things always pan out. If you want any advice, just let me know via email, you lovely lot.

Are you being judged by your accent?

This article has a great deal of interesting information about people's attitudese to accents but it comes with a warning - there is a prejudiced attitude to accents in the content. For example, there is a clip of a presenter trying to get a Middlesborough man to use RP (recieved pronunciation, which in itself is an accent, but one not associated with any particular place - instead it's associated with being educated/cultured/intelligent, for no good reason except that it is the accent of upper/upper middle class, private schools, politicians etc.). The presenter follows his success at getting the man to pronounce 'butter' in an RP accent with the comment "Standard English in Middlesborough!" As we know, Standard English is the words and grammar and has nothing to do with accent but his prejudice about the RP accent being the standard/'proper' accent is clear.

Another example is in the other video where the headteacher says that pronouncing words with an RP accent is the way to get children in the school to spell words correctly. Nonsense. Even in RP, English has many, many exceptions about how sounds translate into spellings (grapheme/phoneme correspondence is low in English - we say in Language that English has a defective orthography). It doesn't matter whether you pronounce butter 'butta' or the RP version 'buttu' - it won't help you to spell it with an er on the end because it is a schwa sound that can be spelt in many different ways e.g. the a in umbrella, the e in children, the er in teacher, the ou in favourites etc.

I'm not saying that being able to change your speech to suit the audience/context isn't a good thing; accommodating your accent to your audience can make them feel more comfortable. But the idea that you would be thought less of if you use a regional accent is an outdated and divisive one. Regional accents are actually hghly regarded in some contexts - local news and call centres (Geordie is very desirable as it is thought to sound friendly and would suggest to the caller that the person is going to be helpful), particularly look for certain accents. This still suggests that you can tell something about someone from their accent. Do you think that's true?

Do you have any thoughts/feelings about your own accent or that of others? Do you agree with the findings in the tables at the bottom of the article? We will be discussing these issues in class.