Strand 3/Conventions – Post 7: New Punctuation…☺

We know that language is always changing. Pronunciation changes perhaps faster than other kinds of grammatical changes since it doesn’t match up with the written language very well anyway; so you can say “bought” pretty much however you want, as long as you have something close to a “b” sound at the beginning and something close to a “t” sound at the end. We’re slower to accept morphological and syntactic changes since you can see them in writing. If you say I seen him, that looks a lot different from I saw him, so we notice these variations more. And until recently, I’d say that our punctuation system was pretty set. You can read a very brief history of punctuation in this post, and I’ve also written about how standards of punctuation can vary, as mentioned here, but in general, our system of punctuation has been fairly fixed since the 18th century. So the new punctuation is really exciting! We have old punctuation being used in new ways, and new symbols being incorporated into our punctuation system (emoticons).

Slash/ - Anne Curzan has written about slash, and it was even a runner-up in the Word of the Year vote by the American Dialect Society. The / used to be a not so frequent punctuation mark, but has come in to the spoken language much more frequently of late, and into the written language as slash, written out as a word like that. You can read more about this new conjunction here. What’s especially interesting is that this newish (it’s not clear how new - a former student just wrote me yesterday that she heard a Friends episode from 2002 when Ross says, "So much for my dinosaur slash Amelia Earhart theme park,” so it’s been around at least since then with this newish meaning. Thanks, Mary!) use in which speaking the punctuation (and writing it as slash rather than /) seems to capture something kind of different from how we understand the punctuation mark in writing. And getting a new conjunction is big news, because we just don’t get those very often, like not in 1000 years.

These things: “” - These so-called quotation marks have long been used to mark things other than quotations. I mentioned here the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks which has examples like this one:

. Why are these funny? Let’s first consider the three primary uses for these little marks, “”: (1) to mark direct quotations, (2) as scare quotes, which serve to alert the reader that either the word or phrase is being used in an unusual way or that the writer doesn’t accept the phrase or is using it ironically, or (3) to emphasize, which is what most of the Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks’ examples are intending to express. OK, so why are they funny? Because we can read them as scare quotes, even though we know that’s not their intended use: Excuse our “Emptiness”

It seems that all of these writers can’t be wrong in their use of this bit of punctuation. It’s simply less established than the other two uses of the “” marks. It’s true that the emphatic “”s show up a lot more in hand-written signs where we don’t have the benefit of bold or increasing font size in a systematic way, so these marks “” are given yet another duty. But the emphatic use is not something that was likely ever taught. It’s come about out of a need; writers’ ingenuity comes into play. In speaking, of course, we’d have other ways of making the point, with intonation, pitch, and facial expressions. In print, we have to make do with other methods. Would underlining be preferable? Why or why not?

Ellipses… - My students brought the changing meaning of ellipses to my attention. We all know the basic use of these within a quotation where you’ve left some of the stuff out: Harry Potter said, “In school if you make a mistake, you can just try again…but out there, you don’t know what that’s like.” That’s not new or interesting. The new use is mostly in texting. Texting has brought about all kinds of appropriation of existing punctuation, and in some cases, these are gaining new meanings. So one student mentioned a text he received from his dad which read something like “Give me a call when you get a chance…” The student was worried; he interpreted the ellipses as a marker of anger or disappointment. Other students agreed that they would too. When he talked with his dad, though (abandoning texting in favor of a voice call since he thought Dad was mad), Dad was fine and hadn’t intended that meaning at all. I think I got the dad’s intended meaning from the ellipses, though: this isn’t urgent, call when you can, no big deal. The ellipses as used in text messages have completely different meanings for these two writers.

The Period. - Similarly, there’s an article here on the changing meaning of the period in texting and other informal online communication: When there is a shift in topic, a line break can do the job. Most texters would agree that

I’m home now
what’s for dinner?

can sound a lot friendlier than

I’m home now. What’s for dinner?

The question I like to pose to my students is how they know all this. Where do their ideas about the meanings of the punctuation and the contexts in which they are appropriate come from? How are these standards and new uses emerging? My students – and yours too – definitely have a sense of when certain marks are appropriate and when they are not. And because some of these uses are relatively new, we’re not all on the same page, so to speak, and so misunderstandings can emerge. I just think this is a cool way to begin to explore the notion of standardization and language change and to realize that now, as always, we the people are the creators of the standards. And it’s important to drive home that the students are really savvy about these evolving rules of etiquette and conventions. And, in fact, students are knowledgeable not only about conventions of texting, but also about when to use various genres of writing styles (despite the myth that texting language is ruining “language skills”. See here for a LanguageLog post on that). Focusing on their knowledge is a good way to introduce these topics - You’re good at this! Now let’s explore what you know! Linguist John McWhorter, in this New York Times piece, writes the following about texting and email:

“…the looseness and creativity of these new ways of writing are a sign of a new sophistication in our society. This becomes clear when we understand that in the proper sense, e-mail and texting are not writing at all….Keyboard technology, allowing us to produce and receive written communication with unprecedented speed, allows something hitherto unknown to humanity: written conversation. In this sense, [emails and texts] are not “writing” in the sense we are accustomed to. They are fingered speech.”

I think there are lots of conversations and activities that could emerge from the info in this post, but here are a few:

Activity: Have students consider their uses of capitalization in texting, in email, and in other online communication. Do they ever not capitalize the first letter of their name? If so, when? What factors enter in to that choice? What about ALL CAPS? Would they ever use that in a message, and if, so, what is the intended effect?

Activity: Have your students consider their use of acronyms and abbreviations such as lol, brb, or ttyl. Do they use them? If so, in what situations? Have them come up with other acronyms and abbreviations that are completely integrated into the language, such as radar, laser, and scuba or DVR or tv, or ID. If they aren’t aware of what the full forms of these words and phrases are, have them look those up in a dictionary. (Many of my students report that their parents, in their 40s and 50s, for the most part, are much more consistent users of abbreviations such as u for you and ur for you’re or your, and also of the acronmyms.)

Activity: What is the future of emoticons? Emoticons offer us an opportunity to express emotion in writing in a way that is otherwise really cumbersome. We can convey that something is ironic or silly or sad, without using words. We can soften the way that something is read. Now, the use of emoticons is restricted to texts, chat, and some email communication, but have your students discuss whether these features might ever enter into more formal written discourse. What would be the benefits? Drawbacks?

Oh, and no discussion of punctuation is complete without mention of the interrobang. My students always lament its lack of popularity. I tell them they have the power to make it happen.

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 20 - Restrictive and Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses - and punctuation again

Relative clauses are clauses (so they contain a subject and a predicate) that describe, or modify, a noun. They fall into two classes, restrictive and nonrestrictive. The restrictive ones limit, or “restrict” what the noun refers to.

The realtor [who is selling our house] is really funny.
The place [where we love to go on vacation] is usually Orcas Island.
The child [who is juggling] wants to be in the circus.

So the bracketed clauses here pick out which realtor, place, and child.

Nonrestrictive relative clauses, on the other hand – though they might provide similar information – do not restrict the reference of the noun in the same way as restrictive relative clauses. In writing, nonrestrictive relative clauses are set off by commas, and you can also usually detect “comma intonation” in a speaker’s voice, distinguishing the two types.

restrictive: The PlayStation which we bought recently from a friend wasn’t too expensive.

nonrestrictive: The PlayStation, which we bought recently from a friend, wasn’t too expensive.

The restrictive relative clause, which (or that - I’ll come back to that) we bought recently from a friend, limits which PlayStation we’re referring to, to the one we bought recently from a friend. The non-restrictive relative clause, on the other hand, does not restrict the reference of the noun PlayStation; it isn’t information that distinguishes this PlayStation from other ones. That we bought the PS from a friend is simply extra, incidental information.

This difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive is really revealed when you have a noun that there is only one of - a proper noun. In that case, restricting that already singular set is weird, but using a non-restrictive clause is fine.

Hailey, who I saw on the bus yesterday, has a new graphing calculator.
??Hailey who I saw on the bus yesterday has a new graphing calculator.

This second sentence could only work if there is more than one Hailey and this is picking out the intended Hailey - the “on the bus Hailey” not the “next door neighbor Hailey” or something.

Activity. Identify the relative clauses in the following sentences and then determine whether they are restrictive or non-restrictive by putting commas around the non-restrictive ones. Many of them could be both, but the meaning would be slightly different. If that’s the case, briefly explain the difference.

The kid from your class who has that cool dog is walking towards us.
The store only allows returns that have the tags on and a receipt.
The sunglasses which I bought last month already broke.
Some gum is in my bag which is on the table.
The girl who is going to buy our old bikes is coming over tomorrow.
Sue who is going to buy our old bikes is coming over tomorrow.

There is a prescriptive rule of writing that suggests that which should be used with non-restrictive relative clauses and that with restrictive relative clauses. This rule, however, varies, by style guides and editors, and is also a fairly recent restriction. Both which and that are and have been common for centuries with restrictive relative clauses. Most speakers and writers would agree that it sounds odd, however, to use that in a non-restrictive relative clause; you probably wouldn’t write (or say)

Sushi, that I love, is on sale at the market.

MS Word seems to be reinforcing this rule, though. When its grammar checker finds which not preceded by a comma, it suggests the change to that. It’s not incorrect, however, to have which in restrictive relative clauses. British English conventions care even less about this. Oxford Dictionaries writes, “In British English, restrictive relative clauses can be introduced by that or which when they are referring to things rather than people.”

The coat that/which Dan had on yesterday was new.

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about this debate - whether which should be used in restrictive relative clauses - can be found here.

It’s a question which you can think about and analyze for yourself. Sometimes I just think which sounds better (but Word has given me a green squiggle line for that last one!).

Strand 1/Grammar: Lesson 17 - Prepositions

What to say about prepositions? Their main job is to relate or connect two parts of a clause. But that's vague - lots of categories do that. As mentioned here, many of them convey some kind of directional, spatial, or locational meaning. I mentioned there too that we have seen preposition meaning undergo changes, like all words, and that many of the original spatial relations have been extended, often metaphorically, to convey other kinds of meanings like time (until 6 o’clock, since I was four), manner (by train), accompaniment (with fries), among others. And consider the prepositions in the following examples.

I am standing by the pole.
The poem was written by my friend.
She wore a shirt with stripes.
They hit the ball with a stick

So their meanings are quite polysemous, which is cool, and is just one indicator of how they have lost some of their meaning, on the one hand, while gaining more subtle meaning distinctions on the other. Believe it or not, there’s a great little 5-minute video from The Human Language Series by Gene Searchinger where Ray Jackendoff talks about the complexity of prepositions.

Prepositions’ transition from being content words to function words means that that their “contentful” meaning is lost, which is why we find variation in which one can be used.

I waited in line for the movie.
I waited on line for the movie.

I picked up the wrong shirt on accident.
I picked up the wrong shirt by accident.

I feel sick to my stomach.
I feel sick at my stomach.
I feel sick on my stomach.

Prepositions have changed over time from being meaningful, content words to being more grammatical, function words. (See the Parts of Speech doc here.) And the fact that we can use varying prepositions also demonstrates this lack of specific meaning. Their presence is key, though. No one that I know of can have no preposition in any of the examples above.

Prepositions ride the line between being content/form/meaningful/open class words and function/grammatical/closed class words. Our main content words are nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We can and do add new words to these categories all the time. The other classes of words (which includes determiners, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, degree words, modals, pronouns, and quantifiers) have members that are fairly fixed, and new words do not join these categories very frequently. (One recent exciting new conjunction, though, is slash. Read what Anne Curzan says about it here. My students are in solid agreement on the new usage of this conjunction slash conjunctive adverb.) Prepositions haven't been added to the language in a very long time, so in that way they seem like a closed class. They, however, do still have some "real" meaning - up means up, down means down. But others are more ethereal.

As discussed in that other post, there are a group of prepositions, sometimes called subordinating conjunctions, which introduce clauses. Some don’t like the “conjunction” part of this label since conjunctions join “like” things – NPs (dogs but cats), VPs (runs or jumps), PPs (in and out), APs (big and tall), clauses (We ate all the cereal, but then we bought some more.). And this subtype of preposition introduces subordinate clauses, so they are not equal to, but subordinate to or dependent on, the main clause. They include after, as, before, since, until, because, while,(al)though, when, where, and phrasal ones such as even though, as much as, and as though.

We arrived at school [after the doors were locked].
The squirrels simply looked at us [as we filled the feeder].
My relatives give me money [because they have no idea what I like].

If you feel more comfortable calling these subordinating conjunctions, I see no problem with that. Or, as I mentioned, my students prefer the term subordinating prepositions.

I haven't constructed a lesson plan for prepositions because the teachers I work with have seen no need for one. Students are able to identify them fairly easily, and there aren’t many usage rules surrounding them (except the one about not ending a sentence with a preposition, which I can’t bear to draw more attention to, especially since it’s a faux rule, but if you want to read about it, there certainly are places you can do that. And in fact Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has a good short video about it). Common Core Standards want students to know about prepositions. Here's just one example from 5th grade, but there are several others. And I will post soon about how prepositional phrases correlate with subject-verb agreement. Oh, and there are a whole group of words, called particles, that used to be prepositions and now glom on to the verb. So I'll talk about those. They're cool - and they can be a pain in the neck for non-native English speakers. In the meantime, prepositions are interesting little beasts, so you should bring them up.