Good and Bad

• Grammar
  Language may be evaluated as "good" or "bad" using grammatical criteria. However this evaluation changes depending on context. For example, you wouldn't speak colloquially in the same way as you might write a formal report.
• Swearing/Taboo language
  various topics are taboo, typically sex+religion and these have words that are associated with them which are especially shocking when heard out of context. However, it must be noticed that the use of a word like "fuck" is common to many speakers of English, although it is universally recognised as being potentially offensive and not used e.g. by BBC. Perhaps this is something to do with the context: when it's "OK" to use it. But use of "bad" language is one of the things that causes most complaints to broadcasters, although it's not something that people complain about to people in the streets
• Slang
  people (especially teenagers) adopt speech style/slang that is characteristic of their peer group, e.g. "wicked". Often these terms have made a move from a subculture to mainstream. Slang seems to be innovated by mid-late teens, and is often frowned on by older people.
• Misuse
  Words such as "infer" to mean "imply", and "aggravate" to mean "irritate" are seen as "incorrect" by people who are familiar with the earlier meanings. But language evolves to adapt new meanings to old words, e.g. "hopefully" which used to be an adverb but is now commonly used in expressions such as "hopefully it will not rain today". Similarly, neologisms such as "overview" provoked resentment by some people - perhaps because it was seen as a literal translation of the German "ubersicht"?
• pronunciation
  E.g. the insertion of an "r" sound in such sentences as "the idea of something" - people sometimes complain of this as an indication of declining standards, and rationalise it by saying "there is no r in the spelling". But this is not a new phenomenon, and is more likely to be a kind of co-articulation caused by the relative difficulty of pronouncing the phrase without using an "r"

  Alternative pronunciations of "kil'ometer" vs. "'kilometer" cause resentment by some people. "haitch" instead of "aitch" is seen as unpleasant, where it has connotations of class distinction.

• Accent
  We all tend to feel our speech is "normal" and it's everyone else who has an accent: this may cause us to make judgements about other people based on how much we perceive them as deviating from "normal"

Whenever there's a change in language, there are segments of the population who resist the change, and rationalise their resistance to such change

Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammar

1. Some people "know" grammar (e.g. teachers, writers, journalists), some don't.
   But everyone "knows" grammar, having been exposed to a language since childhood
2. Written language has grammer; spoken language doesn't
   Spoken language is often broken with pauses/hesitations etc.. But a study of speech reveals lots of grammaticality - e.g. verb agreement. And at the discourse level, analysis shows that speech has a systematic grammar
3. Grammar is what is contained in a "grammar" (book)
4. Grammar is either good or bad
   "bad" presumably means "different from standard"
5. Some language have more grammar than others
   E.g. German has 16 "the" forms and many affixes which change depending on gender etc. which seems a lot of effort compared to English. But high competence in English is just as hard to reach as in German. Sometimes this position is used to justify looking down on pidgin languages as being "broken"

History of prescription

In the 20th Century, people started to regard certain accents as "bad", objecting to pronunciation and accents which they regard as lazy, e.g. criticising the speech in EastEnders for being a bad influence on spoken English throughout the country. However studies such as the MK study seem to indicate that there's more going on than a simple copying of TV characters - it would appear that pronunciation is more affected by interaction between people than by what they observe on the media: although certain speech features may be picked up, not all are (e.g. the "f" for "th" seems to be spreading, but other aspects, such as vowel sounds, don't: people don't seem to say "shut your marf"). Also, regional accents still persist, after twenty years of EastEnders.

Philip Norman, in the Sunday Times, wrote of childrens' TV presenters: "Their influence over the way our children speak is another matter. Everyone knows that young Britons today talk with a horrible accent, but young women are far worse than young men, and the worst of all are young female television presenters. There's probably no more powerful aural influence on children in Britain today than female television announcers".

Key Points (from handout)

• People have attitudes towards all components of language: phonetics, grammar, vocabulary
• Prescriptive vs. descriptive approaches to grammar
• so-called justifications for particular prescriptive statements about language
• difficulty of unpacking aesthetic vs. social judgements