Talks
Silke Brandt: The development of simple and complex syntax in first language acquisition
Complex sentences allow children to talk about cause and effect (she got sick because she didn’t wear a jacket), to specify referents (she picked the one that he made last year), and to talk about their own and other people’s beliefs and knowledge states (she believes that it’s raining). I will present studies showing how children pick up these sentence structures from their input and how their acquisition of these sentence types is constrained by their understanding of the underlying concepts, such as their understanding of other people’s beliefs and knowledge states.
Jonathan Culpeper: Politeness and impoliteness in interaction
This presentation begins by rapidly etching in the classic politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1987). Thereafter, it explores two areas that go beyond that theory. One is how politeness works in interactional contexts, and touches on, for example, the notion of reciprocity. The other is how politeness needs to be complemented by an account of impoliteness to adequately describe some interactions. The presentation concludes with an analysis of some data from the talent show Pop Idol.
Download slides: Jonathan Culpeper (PDF)
Sam Kirkham: Language variation and identity in Britain
This presentation overviews recent research in language variation and change, and explores how language variation can be used to construct identities and social styles. In particular, I focus on language use within educational contexts in the UK and discuss the findings of in terms of (i) the changing demographic profile of Britain’s towns and cities; and (ii) recent media discourse on accent and dialect in British schools.
Karin Tusting: Paperwork practices in educational workplaces
This presentation reports on research carried out in two contrasting educational workplaces exploring the impact of paperwork demands on the workplace experiences and identities of frontline staff. Coming from the perspective of literacy studies, the project analysed the factors that made paperwork problematic for people, the strategies that were adopted to deal with it and the consequences of this for educational practice
Willem Hollmann: The revised glossary of grammatical terms for the National Curriculum: some answers to old questions, some new issues
In this talk I will discuss aspects of the revised glossary of grammatical terms for the National Curriculum as well as a glossary that is currently being compiled by the Linguistics Association of Great Britain for the benefit of teachers and students. We will explore some of the ways in which these glossaries differ from previous ones, paying attention to for example the role of meaning in definitions of grammatical terms, and to the aim of providing more continuity between primary/secondary education on the one hand and language/linguistics in HE on the other.
I also want to link the compilation of these new glossaries to the growing awareness of the importance of K(nowledge) A(bout) L(anguage). And in this broader context I plan to mention recent efforts towards setting up a new A-Level in Linguistics, and will be very interested in hearing participants’ opinions on what might be covered in this new qualification (and how!) so as to make it appealing to the students, relevant to a university degree in linguistics or a related subject, yet also sufficiently distinct from the A-level in English Language.