Married texting & woman doctors

A couple of things that crossed my screen today that might be great starting points for thinking about projects.

Married texting

Alice Zhao analysed the texts between her and her now-husband in 2008 and 2014, looking at what changes as a couple goes from courting to marriage. She noticed things like they no longer greet each other. Seems like a lot could be done with this kind of thing--how does texting change between parent and child as the child moves away? How does it change from fresher's week to knowing people very well in year 3? Or, how does it change in other romantic relationships--would anyone have found what Zhao found?


Woman  v  female (etc.)
This piece by Maddie York in the Guardian style blog argues that woman shouldn't be used as an adjective as in woman doctor or women writers. She notes that people talk about male doctors not man doctors.  What's going on here?  Has it to do with the connotations of man/woman/male/female? Is something that's changing? What are the prescriptions, who's making them and why when it comes to these kinds of things?

Wonderings on evaluation

Two things today, both to do with evaluation:

1. I (Charlotte) was talking about variation with the first year students recently and we tried out a few data elicitation methods including brainstorming alternative terms for everyday concepts. The interesting one for me was ‘pleased with yourself/about something’ because they drew an absolute blank and couldn't think of anything, except perhaps chuffed which they said they knew but wouldn't use. In contrast, when we looked at alternatives for terms like amazing etc. they had a huge number of candidates. So, it got me wondering, was this just a one off or, to use the appraisal terms, could it be that we are shifting towards expressing evaluation more in terms of appreciation (it was amazing/epic etc.) than affect (I was so happy/thrilled etc.)?
2. The second thing was inspired again by something I was talking about with the first years, in this case an article by Charlie Brooker on hyperbole, and his argument is that a) this is something new and b) something that people do online but not in face to face interactions. You could test that…

We could test that

Something that I (Charlotte) find myself doing a lot when reading news stories is thinking ‘Interesting. We could test that’. So much of what we read is based on assertions that lack supporting evidence, or, cast in a more positive light, presents ideas that are still in a pretty nascent state. At worst this is hugely frustrating, at best it can provide ideas for projects...

By way of an example, a few years I was reading an article that stated that ‘Unlike ‘science’, this new term – ‘The Science’ – is a deeply moralised and politicised category. Today, those who claim to wield the authority of The Science are really demanding unquestioning submission’ (Furedi 2008). I thought this was a really interesting idea, and, because it was a claim based on two lexical items, it looked like something that could be effectively investigated from a corpus linguistic perspective. It led to this article and I learnt a lot about how the science has indeed become a rhetorical device that is used to assert authority without disclosing anything about the science itself.

So, to help you think about possible project ideas, here are four stories that I saw and thought ‘we could test that’:

1. This article was talking mainly about British men going to fight in Syria, but the claim that caught my eye was that 'The language used in public to discuss war has become extraordinarily distorted – and not only among radicalised communities. Combat is routinely described in the media as though it were a form of sport'. And this got me thinking that a really useful project could be an analysis of whether metaphors for war have changed over time.
2. A while ago I read an article (but can’t remember where sadly) which talked about how women's bodies are used in the media as a metaphor for the text producer's evaluation of the Iranian government; so articles depicting an authoritarian regime will be accompanied by pictures of a veiled woman, while those talking about it as a more liberal state than its neighbours will use a picture of a woman with her hair uncovered and so on. I don’t know how this would develop as project and it would have to be for someone confident in multimodal CDA, but it was a different perspective on an old debate. 
3. There has been a lot of discussion recently about possible BBC bias in the representation of the Scottish independence debate, for instance this article reports on a demonstration about bias, and so I was wondering whether there was much language evidence for this. This is potentially a huge project and would need narrowing down, but could be topical and revealing. 
4. Finally, this article from yesterday’s Guardian was talking about the language of poverty and got me wondering about whether/how poverty may have shifted in terms of its associations, and how it currently relates to terms like inequality and deprivation (these are just the terms discussed in the article). 

I also wrote about a possible project from an article which asked So why does the western feminist movement hardly look at African feminism for clues?  on another blog last year, you can have a look here.

three things I wondered about today

This blog has been fairly quiet for a while. It's a trick for us all to remember to post here when we have little wonderings. But let me revive it by pointing out some things I wondered about language today.  I've not really researched them (that's not my job here--they're wonderings), but I have had a look to see if there's any recent work on the topics and will link to them here as starting points. (I am linking to the public-facing journal sites, so if you want to read the articles, you're better off searching for them through the library, where access may well be free.)

1. English learners are taught to pronounce the as 'thee' before vowels and 'thuh' before consonants. The whole story is more complicated.  I'm wondering: are there dialectal differences (including national US/UK differences) in this?  Do learners follow the 'rule' or pick up other uses of 'thee'?
   
2. Ad-hoc abbreviations to fit the 140-character limit in Twitter: which words do ppl shortn? How? Why? Where?  Here's a possibly interesting article re this & age.
3. Here's an article about the language of restaurant menus in 1970s United States. What do menus tell us today? Which non-English words make it in (and why)? How are the descriptions structured? What do they tell us about class, food, consumerism...? The new book by Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food, might cover some of this.

tag questions in AmE/BrE

Another American/British English question from the woman who's obsessed with them.


A paper by Gunnel Tottie and Sebastian Hoffmann used a corpus methodology to find that the British use NINE TIMES more tag questions than Americans. BUT they only studied canonical tag questions. I have my suspicions that the story might've been quite different if they'd looked at non-canonical ones.

Canonical tag questions have an auxiliary or modal verb that is in the opposite polairty (i.e. affirmative or negative) to the main clause, plus a pronoun that co-refers with the subject of the main clause. So:

You've cut your hair, haven't you?  [affirmative clause + negative tag]
You don't like broccoli, do you?  [negative clause + affirmative tag]

 Non-canonical ones would be things like:

He's a loser, innit?
You're taking semantics, right?
The weather is great, eh?

And other things like that where the tag is there to kind of ask the hearer to confirm what's been said. (I say 'kind of' because the purpose might not be quite that straightforward.)

So, if we take those kinds of things into account, do the British really use more tag questions than Americans? Do they use the same non-canonical tags? Do they use them for the same purposes?

Leave-taking online

Another Twitter-inspired post.  Someone just wrote:

Is it unreasonable to expect that chats should end with a farewell or sudden-unexpected-internet-fail? We say hi but never bye.

Makes me think of how difficult I find it to end a chat conversation--much worse than phone. How we 'take our leave' in conversation has been written about, but do the patterns remarked upon in that literature spill over into online conversations? How does politeness work in chat, especially with regard to ending or beginning conversations?

business language - business letters

Someone said to me on Twitter today:

I bet BrE (dunno abt AmE) business language has changed drastically in the last 50 yrs or less. All that "your esteemed favour of the 11th ultimo" stuff was around within living memory.

Ok, maybe not your living memory.  But it struck me that this could be an area for a project.  How has the way in which companies correspond with customers changed, for instance?  Or within companies, how did they communicate?  Do changes come with the shift from paper memos to email?  Did they come with the social liberalisation of the 60s/70s? What is formality now versus formality then?  One could even just look at a particular part of communication--how do people introduce a topic, greet, sign off?

I've not offered a particular question or a methodology here (nor have I pre-researched it), but if one had access to, say a family business with long records, or looked into what public archives might be available, there could be some interesting areas to explore...

Twitter hashtags

Hashtags are used on Twitter to mark a topic, so that people can follow a group of tweets on the same topic by various people.  So, for instance, this one is to make the tweet stand out to people who are searching for tweets about language:

[video & article] Children developed own #language in cave http://bit.ly/bnKJDL 

But people are using them for other things, where it's clear that it's not to identify a topic or theme.  Here are a few examples: 

You know when you've worked really hard revising a story, then suddenly realize you were revising an old version? #pullhairoutofhead #cry

 Me: "I'm not accepting new work now." Would-be client (self-pub author): "Well, can you just review what I've done myself?" #no

 ugh, the intros are the hardest part. Spent three hours on 3pp writing. Still not sure if it's too-detailed or not-enough. #onward

 SO many ways to get hold of a book these days. I mean there's really no excuse http://bit.ly/myfryapp #shamelesswhoring

So, why and how do people use hashtags?  What does it serve to put it after a # rather than just saying it?