Average English child says ‘like’ five times more than their grandparents as 20 year language study finds standards are also slipping at the House of Commons

• The research is part of the Cambridge English Corpus – one of the biggest collections of words in the English language
• Over 20 years, it has formed a database which shows a decline in the correct use of grammar

By TARA BRADY

PUBLISHED: 11:21 GMT, 18 May 2013 | UPDATED: 11:51 GMT, 18 May 2013

 

A new study from Cambridge University reveals language is becoming more informal and even royalty and MPs are speaking incorrectly.

The average English child is likely to say the word ‘like’ five times as often as his or her grandparents and the word ‘love’ is used more than six times as often as ‘hate’.

The research is part of the Cambridge English Corpus – one of the biggest collections of words in the English language in the world.

Development or decline: Art critic Brian Sewell is regarded as someone who uses formal English while Janet Street-Porter uses a demotic accent and grammar, the study showed

The Corpus contains written and spoken English from books, newspapers, advertising, letters, emails, websites, and recordings of conversations, lectures, TV, meetings, radio and many other sources, totalling several billion words.

Over 20 years, researchers have formed a database which shows there is a decline in the correct use of grammar.

 

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Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Cambridge, told The Times: ‘We can listen to debates in Parliament and hear MPs saying things like ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’.

He cited a 2005 interview with Prince Charles, who was educated at Gordonstoun independent school, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme which was ‘informal’.

But he said in recent years as a university lecturer, he had seen a weakness in spelling and grammar among his students.

Prince Charles’ interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was considered ‘informal’ while George Osborne was recently mocked for adopting a ‘mockney’ accent

Art critic Brian Sewell and historian David Starkey are regarded as public figures who still use formal English.

While Janet Street-Porter and footballer David Beckham are viewed as more ‘demotic’.

Recently, the Chancellor George Osborne was mocked for using informal language despite being educated at St Paul’s and Oxford University.

Research: Cambridge University carried out the study which reveals language is becoming more informal

Claire Dembry, from Cambridge University Press, said people are now embracing the different forms of the English language.

Researchers also exam papers written by foreign students and discovered the word which caused the most confusion was ‘because’.

Other words which stump non-English speaking students included ‘accommodation’, ‘beautiful’, ‘advertisement’, ‘which’ and ‘environment’.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326520/Average-English-child-says-like-times-grandparents-20-year-language-study-finds-standards-slipping-House-Commons.html#ixzz2Tfg28kGj
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Grammar rules everyone should follow

Following the inaugural Bad Grammar awards, Thomas Jones lists nine grammatical conventions that, depending on context, you may – sorry, might – as well adhere to

• Thomas Jones
• The Guardian, Thursday 9 May 2013 14.56 BST

The Idler Academy’s inaugural Bad Grammar award was bestowed last week on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to Michael Gove in March criticising the education secretary’s revised national curriculum. The letter reads at times as if it was written by committee, but does it really display “the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better”? Hardly. Like many such gongs, up to and including the Nobel prize for literature, the Bad Grammar award looks suspiciously like the continuation of politics by other means. One of the three judges was Toby Young, whose latest book is How to Set Up a Free School; Gove apparently told fellow guests at a Spectator party last year that he’d like Young to stand as a Tory MP. “The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing,” Young said. Steven Pinker (no soft leftie) put it slightly differently in The Language Instinct 20 years ago: “Since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths, differentiating the elite from the rabble.”

Despite all that, it’s still the case that some ways of writing are clearer and more elegant than others, and some of the shibboleths are worth following for the sake of clarity, elegance and consistency (I’m fairly sure I don’t think that just because I’m an editor at the London Review of Books). They’re conventions not rules, however, and different conventions apply to different kinds of discourse: constructions that are unacceptable in so-called Standard English and wouldn’t find their way into the LRB or the Guardian – a reinforcing double negative, say – are more than fine in other registers (eg “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”).

Bearing all that in mind, here are nine conventions (the number as arbitrary as everything else) that are more or less worth adhering to, depending on context, though none of them are hard-and-fast rules (and, yes, I have tried to discreetly break most of them in this preamble).

1. Dangling (or unattached) participle “Going to the shops, a dog ran in front of my bike.” The dog must have been worried they were about to run out of bones at the bone shop. Dangling participles are best avoided because they can change the meaning of a sentence. And while it’s true that most readers will be able to understand what you’re getting at, it’s still worth saying what you mean. So: “As I was going to the shops” or “On my way”.

2. That/which

“Which is appropriate to non-defining and that to defining clauses,” HW Fowler wrote in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926). “The dog that ran in front of my bike had floppy ears.” “The dog, which had floppy ears, ran in front of my bike.” It’s often a fine distinction, and was very possibly invented by Fowler, but it can nonetheless be useful. As with dangling participles, it’s about saying what you mean.

3. Split infinitive

One of my English teachers once told us that the critic Helen Gardner’s last words were: “My dear, try never to split your infinitives.” A nurse had asked her: “Would you like me to gently prop you up?” Split infinitives are worth avoiding to keep pedants at bay, but there’s nothing actually wrong with them, and a split infinitive is preferable to an inelegant alternative. “To boldly go” is resoundingly iambic, the alternatives – “boldly to go” or “to go boldly” – either flighty or leaden. The rule against splitting infinitives was supposedly invented by Dryden, by analogy with Latin, in which the infinitive is a single word.

4. Who/whom

Whom is on the way out, and won’t be much missed. There’s nothing wrong with saying: “Who am I speaking to?” The stiffer formulation “To whom am I speaking?” can be useful if you want to be stiff. But no one would ever say: “Whom am I speaking to?”

5. Ending a sentence with a preposition

Like beginning a sentence with a conjunction, this is always completely fine. As Winston Churchill never actually said, it’s the kind of pedantry “up with which I will not put”.

6. Due to

The idea that “due to” is wrong, but “‘owing to” is OK is bogus. They’re both wrong if used to mean “because of” and both OK if used to mean “the result of”. “Due to unplanned engineering works, the train to Basingstoke has been cancelled” is a mistake. “The train to Basingstoke has been cancelled; this is due to unplanned engineering works” is fine. Still, “due to” is best avoided because it leads to formulations such as “due to the fact that”, which is a really clumsy way of saying “because”.

7. Greengrocer’s apostrophe

“Carrot’s” and “apple’s” are not so common, but almost everyone occasionally writes “who’s”, “it’s” and “you’re” for whose, its and your. That’s the problem with following rules – such as the rule that possessives are distinguished from plurals by an apostrophe – sometimes they don’t apply.

8. Different from, not to or than There’s no very good reason for following this rule, but then there’s no reason not to, either.

9. Using the subjunctive in conditional clauses

And finally, another one that’s worth paying attention to, because altering the mood alters the sense. The subjunctive is used to describe a state of affairs that isn’t the case. “If the dog were hungry, it would run to the bone shop.” This means the dog isn’t hungry, as we can tell because it isn’t running to the bone shop. “If the dog is hungry, it will run to the bone shop.” This means the dog may be hungry, we’ll have to wait and see.

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Grammar test for every 11-year-old: Gove unveils back-to-basics exam to drive up standards

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2249160/Grammar-test-11-year-old-Michael-Gove-unveils-basics-exam-drive-standards.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18632399

http://education.gov.uk/

First of all, I do think native English speakers who want to be an English language teacher of ESL or EFL need to LEARN grammar and also learn to know how and why sentences structure. Being capable to speak the language doesn’t mean being able to teach. Even people who speak English as their first language make grammatical mistakes. When they understand the grammar structure, they’ll grow their empathy and understanding of why ESL and EFL students make grammatical mistakes and why they want to know the explanation of sentences structure. Do NOT say “Stupid” to ESL or EFL students when they make mistakes. Do NOT say “I just know it” when they ask for explanations and you don’t know how. Then I don’t think you’re a hard-working teacher. Do your research and STUDY!

Secondly, in fact, the population of ESL and EFL is larger than that of who speak English as their first language. Who uses the correct language? And why users of ESL and EFL should be called “non-native”? “Native” and “Non-native” are actually improper names to define the users of English. Chomsky’s (English) native speaker fallacy results in racial discrimination.

Ahhh, I so much want to go back to Brighton to study again!!!

And, sign, I’m being critical again.

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Cross words! Former Oxford English Dictionary editor secretly deleted thousands of terms with foreign origin

By SEAN O’HARE

PUBLISHED: 10:10 GMT, 27 November 2012 | UPDATED: 15:37 GMT, 27 November 2012

A distinguished former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary attempted to rewrite the dictionary by deleting thousands of words with foreign roots and blaming it on his predecessors, a new book claims.

Deleted words include ‘balisaur’, a badger-like animal from India, ‘Danchi’, a Bengali plant and ‘boviander’, the name in British Guyana for a person of mixed race living on the river banks.

The OED is now re-examining words removed by Robert Burchfield who edited the world respected dictionary during the 70s and 80s and who died in 2004 aged 81.

Mr Burchfield has long been considered the editor who opened up the English dictionary to the wider world, until now.

Sarah Ogilvie, also a former OED editor, in her new book Words of the World reveals how Burchfield started a rumour that his earlier editors of the OED were inward-looking anglocentrics, when in fact the opposite was true and it was Burchfield himself who was deleting foreign words.

After investigating Burchfield’s rumours she discovered they were unfounded and that he was actually responsible for the deletion of words such as ‘shape’, meaning a Tibetan councillor and ‘wake-up’ a golden-winged woodpecker.

She said: ‘I was the editor of the OED responsible for words from outside Europe and while editing these words I noticed a pattern that went against the general consensus: there were thousands of foreign words and words from varieties of English around the world in the dictionary and they had been put there by editor James Murray and his fellow editors.

‘The irony of the whole story is that although in the beginning the dictionary editors were criticised for putting too many ‘outlandish’ words in the dictionary that were ‘decaying’ our language, one hundred years later they were criticised for the opposite: for too many British words in the dictionary and not enough foreign words!

‘But it turns out that this was a myth perpetuated by a 20th-century Chief Editor of the OED.’

As part of her investigation she compared Mr Burchfield’s four OED dictionaries published between 1972 and 1986 to a 1933 edition and found that he had erased 17 per cent of the ‘loanwords’ and world English words that had been included by OED editor Charles Onions, who included 45 per cent more foreign words than Burchfield.

Part of the scandal lies in the fact that usually when a word enters the OED it never leaves.

Early editors of the OED were often heavily criticised or straying too far from the Queen’s English and including foreign words from far flung lands, such as typhoon, bamboo and abattoir.

One reviewer of a 19th century dictionary attacked the inclusion of words from New Zealand and Mexico, writing: ‘There is no surer or more fatal sign of the decay of a language than in the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign words.’

A spokesperson for the OED’s publisher Oxford University Press said one of the dictionary’s current policies was ‘to reevaluate any terms which were left out of the supplement by Burchfield’ and that it continued to add new words from every English-speaking country.

The spokesperson added that Burchfield ‘was insistent that the dictionary should expand its coverage of international words in English and, although he omitted minor terms from the supplement which he was revising and extending, he added many thousands of more fully researched international entries’.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239073/Former-Oxford-English-Dictionary-editor-secretly-deleted-thousands-words-foreign-origin.html#ixzz2DSacVerj

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“Not to” or “To not” — English Grammar

I’d seen him use “to not” in one of his replied email to me. When I saw it, I immediately questioned in my mind, “Isn’t it ‘not to’? Why did he use ‘to not’? I was taught it was always ‘not to’. Why? Is he wrong, or . . .? But he’s a native English speaker . . .”

I didn’t ask him for the explanation or question his knowledge in the end because firstly I understood what he was trying to convey, secondly I decided to believe his knowledge for the sake of his native English speaking background.

 

This grammar issue raised again when I was writing my diary. So, since it bothers me so much, I just looked up the internet for help.

http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/ask-teacher/51269-not-not.html

Quite many people say that both “not to” and “to not” make sense and nothing wrong in use. However, (check the link with the discussion above)

“At first, both sound perfectly correct and natural. After analyzing different real examples of usage, I could infer that “NOT TO” is preferred among educated speakers. That may be so because grammar says that the negative of an infinitive is formed by adding NOT before it.

– Drink water.
He told Janny to drink water.

– Don’t drink water.
He told Janny not to drink water.” (posted by williambosich)

 

And then someone corrected williambosich:

“I think, William, that you might be mistaking a “preference” for a normal neutral. With certain parts of speech, notably adverbs and negations, a change in position often reflects a change in the strength, in the emphasis.” (posted by riverkid)

 

And then I found this website with a reliable mark “.edu”:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002139.html

By the end of article, the author believe “to not” is the correct use. (Please check the link with the discussion above)

“‘in order to not get fat’. (I am not a semanticist, though I play one at Language Log Plaza, so go easy on me here.) But not to get fat is going to get the wider scope semantically: ‘not in order to get fat’. And that’s not what this woman wanted to say.” (posted by Arnold Zwicky)

———————————————————————–

Firstly, I disagree with Zwicky’s “not in order to get fat”, my grammar knowledge tells me it should be “in order not to get fat”.

If “not to” were incorrect, what about Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be: that is the question” in Hamlet? And what about the Idiom: “Not to mention“? If “to not” is grammatically correct, why have I never heard people say “to not mention”?

However, I agree with riverkid’s theory and williambosich’s explanation of different meanings between two.

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