Minutes - Meeting 28th October 2013
Our main priority for this week’s meeting was to discuss and
reflect on Alison’s feedback regarding our project proposal. Our topic of
apostrophe usage on a whole is a manageable topic, but our research question
needed some attention.
Research question:
When looking at examples of apostrophe misuse in social media, text messages and written work, why are people incorrectly using apostrophes?
When looking at examples of apostrophe misuse in social media, text messages and written work, why are people incorrectly using apostrophes?
When discussing our research question, we concluded that
‘everyday usage’ was far too vague. For this reason we have selected instances
including, social media (Twitter and Facebook), text messages and written work
where apostrophe misuse will be displayed.
Furthermore, instead of looking at ‘attitudes’ towards punctuation misuse, we have altered this to specifically looking at the reasons why people aren’t using apostrophes correctly.
Furthermore, instead of looking at ‘attitudes’ towards punctuation misuse, we have altered this to specifically looking at the reasons why people aren’t using apostrophes correctly.
Methodologies:
Altering our research question has inevitably led to changes in our methodologies.
1) With ethical considerations in mind, we will be looking closely at social media, text messages and any friends’ lecture notes or work and pick of instances where apostrophes are misused. To do this we will take a print screen shot or note down any examples.
Altering our research question has inevitably led to changes in our methodologies.
1) With ethical considerations in mind, we will be looking closely at social media, text messages and any friends’ lecture notes or work and pick of instances where apostrophes are misused. To do this we will take a print screen shot or note down any examples.
2) From picking out these mistakes, we will then gain
informed consent from the participant who made the mistake asking them to take
part in our covert ‘punctuation test’ – (we won’t tell the participants that it
is a punctuation test)
3) Finally a questionnaire consisting of open and closed
questions will be given to the participants, measuring the reasons for their
apostrophe misuse.
Literature
During this week’s meeting, we also distributed the readings
Alison suggested between us. These are as followed:
·
Me (Ellie) - Wardhaugh, R. (1999) Proper
English: Myths and Misunderstandings About Language. Oxford: Blackwell
·
Philippa- Burridge, K. (2005) Weeds In The
Garden of Words: Further Observations On The Tangled History Of The English
language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
·
Leanda- Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt & Lars
Hinrichs. 2007. Recent Changes in the Function and Frequency of Standard
English Genitive Constructions: A multivariate analysis of tagged corpora.
English Language and Linguistics
·
Kerry - Zwicky, Arnold M. & Geoffrey K.
Pullum. 1983. Cliticization Versus Inflection: English n't. Language
Garrett, P, Austin, C (1993) The English Genitive Apostrophe: Judgements
of Errors and Implications for Teaching Language Awareness
Good to see some progress - and especially on the 'follow' gadget so I now know when there are new posts!
ReplyDeleteYou have also refined your plans well, but there are still some problems with the project assumptions. You are taking a pretty prescriptive line (see the readings I recommended to understand better how these punctuation conventions, including ideas about what is 'correct' come about and change). And you also risk assuming that people know what they do, and why they do it, including why they make 'errors' - but one obvious reason for writers making an error is because they don't recognise it as an error!
So this project may well develop into something manageable and interesting, but you need to give very careful thought to whether you can in fact find out why people do what they do in this area, and if so how. Please read Unit B3 of the textbook and see how it applies to your project.
Happy to talk about this when we meet.