I think Herb is referring to the following article on errors in college
students' writing:
Connors, R.J. & Lundsford, A. A. (1988). Frequency of formal errors in
current college writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle do research. College
Composition and Communication, 39, 395-409.
The article looks at the frequency of various kinds of errors but also
examines which errors teachers are more likely to notice.
For an earlier study of the kinds of errors that business people find most
serious or "status-marking," you might look at:
Hairston, M. (1981). Not all errors are created equal: Nonacademic readers
in the professions respond to lapses in usage. College English, 43, 794-806.
Another interesting (and more recent) study on readers' responses to errors
is:
Beason, L (2001). Ethos and error: How business people react to errors.
College Composition and Communication, 53, 33-64.
All three articles focus on written, not oral, discourse conventions.
-Amanda
On 9/19/04 10:53 PM, "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Joanna,
>
> That's interesting research and probably worth writing up for publication. I
> should think American Speech or one of the sociolinguistics journals would be
> interested. I touched briefly on resumptives and island constraints a long
> time ago in a paper I did in Language on relative "that" titled "Which that".
> 1976, I think. There is tolerance for them when otherwise there would be an
> island contraint violation, but I didn't collect survey data on it. What was
> interesting was that resumptives arise crosslinguistically about when pronoun
> deletion starts to fail on the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy.
>
> There has also been research in composition surveying teachers on the
> seriousness of writing errors and then examining their performance on an
> exercise where they were to identify the errors in text. Some of the results
> were close to random. I think some of that has appeared in CCC, but I don't
> remember when.
>
> Herb
>
>
>
> Herb writes,
>
> "The interesting question in this discussion, one that really hasn't
> been dealt with, is why some innovations bother us and other don't.
> "Hone in on", for example, while a much more recent innovation, is much
> more widely accepted. Good writers and speakers use it and my students
> are almost unanimously surprised when I explain what's going on with it.
> "Hopefully" as a sentence adverb still drives some to distraction
> while most people have accepted it. But "fun" as an adjective,
> especially an inflected adjective, bothers a lot of people. I'm curious
> whether there's any consistency to which ones have a harder time being
> accepted. I assume that a major factor is social, who uses the
> innovative form, but is there more than social conditioning?"
>
> What a fascinating question! It would be interesting to inquire among
> sociolinguists and see whether anyone has investigated this question.
>
> Some research my students and I did gives evidence of the social factor.
> We did a Hairston-style survey, asking people across a broad range of
> occupations (but all middle-class) which of various usages were
> problematic and to what extent they objected to those that they found
> erroneous. There was a large difference in responses to "errors" typical
> of middle-class speech (changes underway in Standard English) vs.
> "errors" due to dialect differences in grammar. In the first instance,
> less than 50% of the respondants (-ents?) even noticed that there was a
> usage that would be considered an error (e.g., a misuse of 'whom'). The
> disapproval rating for those errors that were noticed was low--about
> 30%, if I recall correctly. However, nearly all respondents noticed the
> dialect differences, and the disapproval rate was around 85%.
>
> I'd suspect, though, that linguistic structure might have something to
> do with it. For instance, my guess would be that differing usages of
> inflectional suffixes, like tense or comparison, on frequent words like
> "fun" would be objected to more strongly, because of the frequency and
> regularity of this type of structure. Phrasal expressions, on the other
> hand, like "hone in on", are less frequent and aren't as transparently
> governed by grammatical rules. In such cases, people really need to be
> aware that the usage is an innovation and not just something they don't
> hear very often. If they are hearing it from someone they consider a
> peer, rather than of a lower class or an errant youth, they are less
> likely to object (as our survey showed).
>
> There are other very interesting questions. I used to collect sentences
> with relative clauses in which a resumptive (excess) pronoun appears,
> usually because the preceding material is so far away that the person
> forgets that they don't need the pronoun. For instance:
>
> "Then there was that big fight that we had when we went camping up in
> the Sierras last summer that I don't even remember what it [excess
> pronoun] was about."
>
> This is a made-up example, but if you listen, you will hear these all
> the time. I recorded examples I'd heard people say. Later I asked them
> if they would ever say such a sentence, and read their own sentence to
> them (which they had forgotten uttering by then). They would invariably
> reject the sentence. Chomskyans would call these performance errors
> which people have time to reject when they are reflecting on them. But
> many languages require the resumptive pronoun.
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
> English Department, California Polytechnic State University
> One Grand Avenue € San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
> Tel. (805)-756-2184 € Fax: (805)-756-6374 € Dept. Phone. 756-2596
> € E-mail: [log in to unmask] € Home page:
> http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
> http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
*****
Amanda J. Godley, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
English Education
University of Pittsburgh
412-648-7313
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
