Journal Articles I Read That I Loved in 2016

(I riffed this title from the Autostraddle column Things I Read That I Love, which is in turn riffed from the Emily Gould tumblr Things I Ate That I Love, full credit.)

In a few short days it will be Christmas. More importantly, in a few short weeks it will be my one year phd anniversary.

The first major piece of writing that I set myself to complete by the one year mark is the first draft of my literature review. I maintain that a “first draft” should be a wild and untethered thing, free from such bothersome constraints as Minimum Standards. My supervisor disagrees. We'll see. In any case, writing a literature review means trawling through everything I’ve read over the past 11 months, no small feat, to find what's relevant.

Obviously a lot of what I read ends up not being relevant to my thesis, but it would be sad to lose that reading to the depths of my Mendeley archives; so here, here I want to celebrate some of the best journal articles and Bits Of Academic Writing that I read in 2016 that won’t make it to the literature review - starting with this gem:

“It must be conceded that unusual sentences do indeed occur in natural language (who ever doubted it?) and as such may be preserved in corpora, like flies in amber.” (Hanks 2012: 405)

Would that I could write like Patrick Hanks. In ‘The Corpus Revolution in Lexicography’,  Hanks discusses the importance of using corpus data - that is, data sourced from collections of actual human language use - for dictionaries and linguistic theory. Left to our own devices, Hanks argues, our intuitions are pretty unreliable about what’s ‘normal’ in language.

For example, you might think ‘walking lamely’ is a good expression in English - and it is, in the sense that it’s grammatical and makes sense. But if you look at English language corpora, people very rarely if ever actually use the expression ‘walking lamely’, so you probably don’t want to include it as a phrase in your language learning textbook. To that end, Hanks writes

“[…] linguistics is the only scientific discipline in which it is considered acceptable first to invent data, then to explain what has been invented, then to claim that something of general validity has been ‘discovered’” (Hanks 2012: 402).

Ooh, burn.

(We do have to be careful, though - language corpora can throw up their own little weirdities - linguistic outliers, if you will. For example according to the AP newswire corpus, the phrase “remove [X] from [body part]” was statistically significant in 1998. This is not actually a frequently occurring phrase in English generally, but rather reflects the fact that in 1998, “President Reagan made several hospital visits to have a polyp or other growth removed from his nose, his leg, his arm, or some other body part, and all this was faithfully reported by the Press, before, during, and after the event” (Hanks 2012: 413).)

Moving on...

There was a time - I am so embarrassed to admit this - there was a time when I thought Joshua Fishman’s writing was convoluted and inaccessible. I was wrong. I pity myself. Yes, Fishman writes in long winding sentences, but they take you to the most beautiful vistas along the way, and he is the master of metaphor, coming from a place of deep learning and passion. (Technically this is from a book not a journal article, and of course Fishman will get heavily referenced in my lit review, but I had to share this. I had to.)

“Without an intimate and sheltered harbor at stage 6, an RLS [Reversing Language Shift] movement tends toward peripheralization from personal and emotional bonds and faces the danger of prematurely tilting at dragons (the schools, the media, the economy) rather than squarely addressing the immediate locus of the intergenerational transmission of [the language] (Fishman 1991: 95 - italics my own)

Speaking of metaphors... apparently there is a method for researching attitudes and beliefs that involves asking your participants for metaphors, the rationale being that metaphors are a window into the subconscious or something. Presented without commentary, here are some of my favourite metaphors from Ian McGrath’s “Teacher’s and Learners’ Images for Coursebooks”.

Language learning coursebooks are like:

• ladies’ handbags because we can take what we need from them and ladies tend to take handbags wherever they go
• a professional killer
• an ugly and terrible girlfriend whom you dislike but have to contact
• a bottle of chicken essence
• a fruit basket
• lions and tigers
• toothache
• nothing
• a beehive which has sweet honey and a lot of painful stings
• an angry barking dog that frightens me in a language I don’t understand
• a pair of shoes. It takes time to choose one that you feel comfortable to wear for a long time. A bad pair will kill you, give you blisters. A good one will give you confidence to run, to jump, to fly high
• my boyfriend, who I hate to see everyday, but I regret I can’t see it during exams

Bless.

And finally, regarding the social responsibility of linguists to contest the monolingual mindset in Australia and 'speak truth to power' - what is language?

“Language is central to every sphere of our lives and to all disciplines. [...] Through language we identify people as belonging or not belonging, we can represent or misrepresent people and manipulate the opinions of others, as is happening now in Australia. [...] Language is an instrument of action, through which we promise, pass judgment, complain, invite and exclude. [...] It is the deepest manifestation of culture, the key to revealing our cultural values and understanding those of others. Language, used in a particular way, can make us sick; used in another, can heal us. It can empower or disenfranchise others. So linguists have exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary research and to work in contexts personally meaningful to them.” (Clyne 2005: 2)

Nothing like Michael Clyne to write about language in a way that is both intelligent and moving, without straying into cheap sentimentality. (I have so much to learn from Michael Clyne.)

References:

Hanks, P. (2012). The corpus revolution in lexicography. International Journal of Lexicography, 25(4), 398–436. http://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecs026

Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 

McGrath, I. (2006). Teachers’ and learners’ images for coursebooks. ELT Journal, 60(2), 171–180. http://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cci104 

Clyne, M. (2006). The social responsibility and impact of the linguist/applied linguist in Australia. 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 1–11. Retrieved from http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2005/clyne-social.pdf