IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR

Hooray! Another article about how 'textspeak' is bad for kids is out! (Daily Mail link, so don't click it – you can get the idea from just reading this post.)

It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.

Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.

In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:

OMG ikr
Yo dude r u still coming to party Friday

I'm just going to take the second one. It contains, among other things, the following grammar:

• a vocative (Yo dude)
• subject-verb agreement (r for 2nd person singular)
• question inversion (r u rather than u r)
• a verb phrase with a prepositional complement (to party) and adverbial (Friday)
• present tense (r rather than were)
• progressive aspect (coming)
• pre-verbal adverbial (still)
• knowledge of which words can be omitted in this context (the, on)

It also has 100% correct spelling, if one allows that r u is an abbreviation rather than an error.

Acknowledgement text tokens

The other day, I was having a conversation with someone over social media. Bear with me, because I'm about to stray into conversation analysis and this is so far out of my area it might as well be cell biology.

Conversations are prototypically turn-taking exercises, with A saying something, B responding, A responding to that, and so on. But obviously this isn't always (or even usually) the way - we interrupt each other, talk over each other, don't finish our sentences, and so on. Another thing we often do is talk for an extended length of time because we have a long story to tell or whatever. When we do this, the other person typically nods, makes encouraging noises, smiles, and generally lets the speaker know they're still listening. But in a text conversation you can't do this. If you try and do it, the little symbol that shows you're typing can put off your interlocutor because they think you're saying something meaningful, and they might stop telling their story. But if you don't, might they think you've gone off somewhere or fallen asleep or lost interest? We need a button that just sends an 'mh-hmh' symbol to show we are still there and paying attention. These are called 'acknowledgement tokens', and we need a text version.

Lembit, txt spk, computer programming

I wrote this post and then didn't post it on the day GCSE results came out, a couple of weeks ago. Here, have it now.

Lembit Opik was on the Wright Stuff talking about GCSEs being dumbed down (always a nice thing to talk about on the day kiddies are finding out if their hard work has resulted in a bright future). The conversation inevitably became about what's wrong with education today, and he said that kids use text speak and 'there is no doubt that this causes problems'.

No doubt? In his mind, maybe. But if you asked, you know, an actual expert on language, you'd find that the exact opposite is true.

For instance, this article describes a study looking at literacy levels of users of text speak and non-users, and says that there was no difference in their literacy (although interestingly, the study participants themselves believed that text speak did have an effect on their literacy!).

This article discusses how the ability to speak in more than one register is no bad thing. It's called code-switching (the term also applies when you switch between languages).

If you don't have access to academic articles, here is Language Log discussing another study about this. You could also do worse than read David Crystal's various books and news items on this topic.

And one point to bear in mind is that kids don't use text speak any more.

All this raises a perennial complaint among linguists: why are random commentators' views more valid than actual experts'? If something about almost any other subject is in the news, they bring in an expert on that topic (or at least something close to it - Dan Snow, for instance, does have a history degree and therefore has some level of history knowledge). If there's an item about language, they'll either trot out some insufferable know-it-all who's totally unqualified, or the presenters will simply discuss amongst themselves. This isn't really acceptable. For one thing, it's not at all useful, whereas an expert might actually provide some new information or a perspective not known to the general public. I may have said this before and I'm just ranting. And linguists' weariness with this situation perpetuates it, because it makes them less likely to want to try to correct misconceptions on breakfast television.

Of course, linguistics is not special in this respect. We all think we know something about a topic if we have even the slightest experience of it. At another point in this programme, someone (I think it might have been Saira Khan) said computer programming was important but not covered in GCSEs. Lembit, in his wisdom, said kids don't need to learn that because they know how to use computers. Saira pointed out that this is true, but they don't know how to programme them. You know what he said? They don't need to know that because they can already use them better than he can. The mind boggles.

Reanalysis of cheese as an adjective

My brother-in-law (sort of - my partner's brother) sent me a text recently that included the name of a type of a squeezy cheese that comes in a tube, called Primula. It looks like this (this is one that - bizarrely - has prawns in it):

He was texting to tell me that his cat likes it, if you're interested. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose.

Anyway, point is, he spelt it Primular. (He has a non-rhotic accent, being from North-East England so it sounds the same as the actual brand name.)

So is this spelling error due to the reanalysis of the name Primula as an adjective, primular? Would it be a type of cheese, primular cheese? I wonder what it means. It sounds a bit like rectangular, regular, circular; I wonder if it's to do with the shape?

Perhaps it's more linked to primary, and it is the supreme squeezy cheese, the squeezy cheese above all other squeezy cheeses. I wouldn't know, as there is no way in the world I'm going to eat that.

Texes? New plurals in English

I'm having some trouble with my mobile phone tariff at the moment, and I rang up the other day to ask how it's going. The woman I spoke to in the call centre had an accent from south-east England; let's say it was a London accent, though I can't really tell the difference between accents down there. She told me that she had added some texts on to my account, but she pronounced the word something like /'teksɪz/.