Joel Heng Hartse

Radiohead's never-recorded-in-a-studio track "True Love Waits" is a favorite of Radiohead fans, but they can't agree on one of the lyrics. It seems pretty obvious to me that the line beginning with "I'll drown my beliefs" ends with "to have your babies." Why? Because the name of the song is a reference to an American Christian abstinence movement, so this lyric turns that on its head, proclaiming a kind of twisted devotion in which someone would abandon something they presumably held dear for the sake of another person. However, our old friend Google-as-corpus offers this:

"drown my beliefs to have your babies" - 113 hits
"drown my beliefs to have you be in peace" - 208 hits


I don't know if this proves anything, because I still think I'm right.

the Beatles: 866,000
the Kinks: 312,000
the Rolling Stones: 220,000
the White Stripes: 183,000
the Shaggs: 2,600
the Mighty Mighty Bosstones: 1,140


I'm not sure what this proves, since objectively speaking there are probably many more bands or things better than the Shaggs than there are those that are better than the Beatles. There must be some kind of over/under, like you have to be famous enough for people to use you in a sentence that states that something is better than you.

Recently, the five (him, him, him, him, and me) members of the Dandelion Method got together and played instruments in the same room for the first time since 2004. Below are a few songs that emerged --one never played before, one made up on the spot , and one written over ten years ago.
  45th and 8th by JTHH

Wonderful - Wake Up to Dreamland
Joshua Stamper - Interstitials
Japancakes - Loveless
Oh No! Yoko - Pau Pau
The Lonely Forest - Arrows

Thought: I've got 700+ lines that are coded with "word choice" (usually with something explaining that in more detail, like "verb form," or "preposition," or "?" when I'm not sure).

I've been explicit about making this study focused on lexis and grammar, so it's not at all surprising that "word choice" is a huge category. I wouldn't be surprised to find that "unusual phrase" is another huge category. (I'm sure it is, just don't know how many exactly.)

Last meeting with supervisor had some discussion about breaking it down into lexis and grammar. Seems logical, though I'm sure lexis will be more than grammar.

What about the "meaning" categories? Eg, "this doesn't make sense" (though that is usually lexical or grammatical at heart). Prob should have semantics as a part of lexis? What about stuff that actually refers to discourse features?

Is "wrong preposition" a lexical issue or a grammatical issue?

Pretty sure "verb form" is grammar, not lexis.

People will describe their rejections in term of "word choice" but that doesn't mean it is strictly a 'lexical' problem.

Still need to think about this a lot. More coming soon.

Incredibly, I find myself having to know how to do Pivot Tables for this project. I first encountered Pivot Tables about ten years ago when I started my first job out of college at Catholic Community Services. I thought I'd never need them again. Oh how wrong I was.

Anyway, just some notes:

I've now coded 4/7 of the data (initially at least) and am starting to see what works and what doesn't. The Pivot Tables allow me to nicely nest things like this:

Type
Subtype
Group number
Chunk
Comment

Having Group Number, Chunk, and Comment together are nice. I can basically look at any given Chunk and its comments very quickly and easily. It also eliminates the need for an additional field called "description" which I was using to go along with group number. (Eg, group 1 is X chunk)

Type and Subtype are trickier. I've been playing around with how to do types, and I have about 200 differnt things entered, but in reality probably more than half are duplicates. The problem is what to do with huge categories like "word choice." That is by far the biggest 'type' category, and it's so big as to be meaningless, I think. I tried to solve that by creating subtypes, but I'm not sure how well that's working. The thing is, I do want to have some pretty big overarching concerns -- or I did, at least. I thought lexis would be a category (word choice), and grammar/syntax/word order etc would be another, but it's all pretty ambiguous. There's a different between a "weird word" and the "wrong word" and the wrong form of a verb, so I don't think that's all really 'word choice.' Maybe it is.

It would help to have a rubric to use, and I kind of have one in Lunsford & Lunsford, but I'll have to modify it since they are explicitly going after things they deem errors. I do need to keep plowing through, but it might be nice to stop and tidy up a bit before I accidentally create 200 more "types." So I'll consult that Lunsfords article in the morning.

Anyway, I'm tired and not finished yet but I have something to work on tomorrow. This is far from statistical analysis, but the pivot table stuff is starting to look pretty cool.

I'm amazed that it is only literally just now that the first major consideration of writing through the lens of sociolinguistics is being done -- Theresa Lillis' book The Sociolinguistics of Writing having just been published this month. The written/spoken divide is wider than I thought, I guess!

Let me try to trace this.

Old-school structural linguistics is all about language as a system, a mental abstraction in your head. Not actually that interested in 'usage' per se.  Interested in the 'ideal speaker/hearer' (after Chomsky) -- the abstracted native speaker whose brain has in it the standard native language he/she acquired from birth.

Standard, idealized language, of course, is something that people rarely produce. (Hence the distinction between competence and performance in theoretical linguistics.) But it is something we can codify -- NB, write down -- and it's here that a weird paradox emerges, which Per Linell calls "the written bias in linguistics." Even though writing is a technology, a cultural innovation that allows us to represent language (that is, speech) in an abstract way, there is somehow a deep connection assumed between standard language, written language, and (crucially) that idealized NS speaker/hearer language deep in our brains. Linell's book points out that "language" is essentially conceptualized as a "structured set of forms, used to represent things in the world" in linguistics, and that this has led to an equation of written language with language, period.

Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, is not interested in 'pure language,' and though this might muddy the waters a bit, many social approaches that could be vaguely subsumed under sociolinguistics are not. Sociolinguistics is the natural result of years of thinking toward a conceptualization of language as a social practice rather than (or in addition to, to be more charitable) a set of forms.

 Sociolinguistics concerns itself with language usage -- data from real people using language, usually in the form of speech. So I'm wondering if it's because of the huge gulf in focus between language as a social practice people and language as forms people that sociolinguists don't ever seem to have considered written texts worth examining when it comes to to the central concern(s) of sociolinguisitics:  language variation and language change.

Is it really only in 2013 that this is seen as a reasonable thing to study, or is this something that disciplinary boundaries hath wrought? In other words, is it that texts are seen as the property of rhetoricians, philologists, literary theory people, or even structural linguists (stylistics?)? Is it that applied linguistics has come up with its own ways of analyzing written texts that doesn't really care about why certain groups of people use language differently in writing than others, or why writing practices change?

Is this a brand new field that is wide open, or has it just been taken for granted that the work is already being done by different people under different names?

Heng Hartse, J. & Shi, L. (2012). Investigating acceptability of Chinese English in academic writing. Contemporary Foreign Languages 384(12), 110-122. Download here.

Heng Hartse, J. (2013). Foreign teachers, Chinese students, and 'English for Different Purposes.' English Teaching in China 2, 52-55. View or download the whole issue here.

To say a writer used the "wrong word" (cf Lunsford and Lunsford, 2008, p. 789) is a pretty serious claim, it seems to me*.

(*This is probably only something a PhD student would say.)

Still.

What is the difference between the following: "wrong word"/ "word choice error" / "inappropriate for an academic essay" / and just a stylistic preference?

And how on earth am I going to categorize this kind of thing?

For example, here are 6 people rejecting the use of the phrase "it is known to all" in an essay:


1 It is known to all: 
Not necessary – if its known to all then why state it

2 It is known to all:
I didn’t know that!  I always advise students to avoid this kind of phrase

3 It is known to all:
Overused, meaningless expression that makes a false claim (it may not be known to all).

4 known to all:
well-known (otherwise this is a bit presumptuous)

5 known to all:
Proper expression: “common knowledge”

6 to all:
Best to avoid superlatives and absolutes in a serious essay-unless there is strong supporting evidence. Try “it is commonly known”, or “many people know”

1-3 seem to be doing basically the same thing -- rejecting it because it's cliche, or a kind of 'empty phrase' that they don't like. (NESTs tend to really go after these things, by the way -- Chinese teachers do it much more rarely.)

4 verges on that, but you could also say it's arguing this is a 'word choice' problem, with a simple substitution of a more appropriate phrase (which again, is a register thing, too).

5 is straight-up correction, probably related to register, but possibly not -- I could just as easily imagine it as a correction of an 'awkwardly worded' phrase ("it is known to all" does sound weird to me).

6 is very clearly looking at it from the perspective of what is considered appropriate for a serious academic essay written by a university student.

So, my question is, does it matter if I differentiate what is going on in each of the comments? Because if I do, I might drive myself crazy.

I can hear the voices of my committee echoing in my head: "It depends on what your research question is."

Oh, but my research questions are damn slippery things that seem to grow and change and shift whenever my mind isn't on them.

I need to print those suckers out, tattoo them on my arms, repeat them like a mantra. I really do.

This about sums up the views of one of my participants, which I've seen in some other participants' responses to 'unacceptable' language:

"The student actually is not wrong in terms of grammar," but the "language habit" is wrong.

Several Chinese teachers refer to "language habit," which I still don't have a clear handle on the meaning of, but in this case she explained that she was referring to a kind of native speaker habit.

Which, considering that mention of habitus and hypercorrection the other day, makes sense. Though I still think calling this "hypercorrection"isn't really fair. It's more like NESTs are "hyper-relaxed" about grammar -- the Chinese teachers are just being "strict," as the participant said. Or, as she also put it: "Your emphasis is on meaning, but my emphasis in on whether they can use language in the right way."

Perhaps it's only from the perspective of the Centre that we have the luxury to focus on meaning and not form -- probably because facility with English means something different here than it does there, so to speak. In China, as many other Asian countries, being good at English isn't really for the purpose of communicating, per se, but for mastering a subject to pass tests, gain knowledge, gain access to jobs, etc.

I hope I don't sound like I'm denigrating that. We NESs get a little precious about our language sometimes when we feel like people don't view it as the magical wonderful beautiful language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare -- which it is, of course! -- and it would probably be better if we accept that for some people, writing an essay is really just a way to demonstrate that you studied hard and know your stuff.

On the other other hand (?), plenty of Chinese teachers I talked to bemoaned students' utilitarian attitudes about English. There is still -- for many English teachers NS & NNS -- a kind of push-and-pull between English as in applied linguistics and English as in the humanities. I suppose there is room for that tension.

The title comes from Santos 1988. I just emailed Terry to let her know that after re-reading her article, I found it ironic that I was pretty much doing a study almost exactly like hers. I don't think her work intentionally had a big inlfluence on my decision to go the direction I'm going, but I feel like I have a better sense of how to marry "acceptability judgments" + "world Englishes" + "L2 writing" after looking at her framework more carefully.

For me, the framework and ideas behind the AJT come from a sociolinguistic framework. It's an interest in variation and how people make decisions about what's 'in or out' according to their (socially mediated) intuitions, beliefs preferences, and other words for subjective feelings or whatever.

The world Englishes stuff is just a natural result of the globalization of English, the de/re-centerting of composition and applied linguistics, and the importance of China in global discourse about education and English.

The L2 writing stuff, I now realize, is a very direct connection to the streams of thought that like to look at two things: 1) "What makes ESL writers' texts different than non-ESL writers?" and 2) "How do readers react to those differences (aka errors)?" #1 is a unique area for L2 writing as a field, but #2 can be traced back to composition studies in the 70s and 80s (Shaugnessy, Lunsford & Connors, etc) -- and ultimately can be traced back to the beginning of time, when the first teacher said "Man, kids today really don't know how to write! They keep putting apostrophes in the wrong places [or whatever]."

Anyway, the title: "Highly Comprehensible, Reasonably Unirritating, but Linguistically Unacceptable." Those are her findings about how content professors reacted to errors in L2 student writing. Isn't it pretty wack how those things don't all add up? That's why I want to keep doing this kind of research.

Incidentally, her definition of acceptability is "the degree to which the interlocutor regards the speech or writing of the NNS as approximating the target language norms." Of course, I'm not really working in an SLA framework, so my definition is necessarily different. Though my working definition is basically "anything that makes somebody go 'waaaait a minute...'" Which is not that scientific, but in a pinch, it'll do.

NOTE: One of my participants used the words "understandable, but unacceptable." Which is very interesting to me since native speakers (and most teachers in fact) are quick to say that they are most likely to go after those things that interfere with 'meaning.'

Sometimes you just get amazing weird fake emails. I just got this one.


SUBJECT: "I dunno why yet but I am sure it will be excellent" (which is so great already.)

BODY:

The woman was beggarly, but of a analogous and active apportion, as spiral frosted dissipate been to scan the pit of the civic fate clarity was smashed to her garter.

Aloud endless this is! pulley must nod wretchedly striped of Willoughby, if, after all that has barely bowed between statement, seduction can tentacle the sandbank of the footlights on gave them are apparently.


(For more on this topic I recommend Kedrick James' article Poet, Pirate, Netbot, although it's a bit of a long/tricky read.)

If you have read this blog and attempted to make sense of the entries, which are obscure notes to myself that happen to be posted in public, you may have noticed that I appear to be on a one-man crusade to renew interest in the concept of "acceptability"in applied linguistics. Why? Because it's versatile, it spans a variety of areas in language study, it's sociocultural, it's about grammar, and everybody has something to say about it. Really: just ask the nearest person to you how to use 'who' and 'whom,' or what kind of word it's OK or not OK to end a sentence with. (Ha.)

In my own reading about acceptability, I've been working my way backwards from a 2003 article by Christina Higgins, usually ending up back someplace in the 1960s or 70s, with Chomsky setting up the need to study 'competence' and linguists coming up with Grammaticality Judgment Tasks, and the realization that there is a distinction between grammaticality and acceptability. Most of what I've been working on is meant to get people involved in the study of English worldwide to take an interest in the relevance of acceptability judgments to our work.

But there's one major publication on acceptability I've never really looked into, and that is Sidney Greenbaum's Acceptability in Language, an edited collection published in 1977. Greenbaum wrote the Oxford Companion to the English Language entry on "Grammaticality," and he is one of the authors of the imposing Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. (He died in 1996.)

Anyway, I'm going to read part of the book this week, and take notes on it here, starting with the

Introduction by Sidney Greenbaum

Greenbaum summarizes and comments on the 13 studies presented in the collection. His second paragraph explains the importance of acceptability to social descriptions of language: "the macro-level concerns attitudes toward the acceptability of a language or a of a variety within a language, whereas the micro-level concerns the acceptability of specific linguistic features" (p. 1). (The methods I use in my own research are meant to bridge the gap between these two, by the way.) He mentions that some studies will "consider the contrast that many linguists make between grammaticality and acceptability " and mentions that the "underlying system in the language" and "the acceptability judgments of individual speakers" are different. (Indeed, I think the latter are worth focusing on for that reason.)

Greenbaum comments on the "crucial significance  of acceptability judgments for linguistic theory and practice, and the reliance of researchers on "the intuitions of native speaker" -- he doesn't particularly criticize this (and I think it doesn't need criticizing, just expansion to a variety of speakers, NS and NNS alike), but does criticize linguists for using "their own intuitions" rather than those of non-linguists. (I wasn't aware this was a big problem, though some of the studies I read from the 1980s do specifically use specialists. In fact, I think the use of specialists is totally fine, but I agree that you probably shouldn't be relying on your own intuitions. I haven't come across any of those studies, however.)

However, a number of the papers in the collection criticize the elicitation of judgments as a method for sociolingusitics (I think Im going to need to read this Labov 1972 paper), arguing that "speech samples" should be the primary data. (Maybe so, for 'pure' sociolx, but again, AJTs are valuable for other reasons ) Greenbaum says that "acceptability intuitions and language behavior do not necessarily coincide and....informant reactions do not always reflect actual usage (p. 5)." "The producible is not always identical with the acceptable."There's a tension within sociolinguistics regarding speech vs intuition -- the question is sociolx is (I think) "how do we account for variation" (both macro and micro) , and I think you probably need both actual usage and attitudes to account for that, at any level.

Grammaticality vs acceptability:
 Grammaticality: is this feature 'in or out?'
Acceptability "does not require a binary distinction between the acceptable and the unacceptable: we can recognize a continuum..." (p. 6)


To read:

From this book:
Acceptability in Context (ch 4) -  van Dijk
Sociolinguistic Reflections on Acceptability (ch 5) Eagleson
Acceptability in a Revived Language (ch 10) Rabin
On the Secondary Nature of Syntactic Intuition (ch 11) Snow and Meijer
Variation, Acceptability, and the Advanced Foreign Learner (ch 13) Tottie

and also
Labov 1972  - Sociolinguistic Patterns (uh oh, it's a book - just find the relevant stuff)