Jean Mulder

Grammar in English Curricula: Why Should Linguists Care?

In Australia, the recently published national curriculum for English embraces not only a return to the explicit teaching of grammar with a commitment to teaching it in context but also includes a distinct strand of knowledge about the English language and how it works. This paper begins with a synopsis of the broader understandings of language encoded in this document, illustrating one approach toward providing a more linguistically informed awareness of language. This is followed by a critical assessment of the grammatical framework, showing that while grammar is positively viewed as a way of describing the language we use as a system, the overall framework has some serious deficits. It is argued that academic linguists have a crucial role to play in shaping a linguistically informed approach to English language education, including engaging with the challenge of elaborating a grammatical approach that is both relevant to students and teachers’ needs and draws on the insights of modern linguistics, and making explicit how grammatical understanding can support the acquisition of skilled language use.

Understanding the place of Australian English: exploring folk linguistic accounts through contemporary Australian authors

Abstract This paper explores Australian English (AuE), utilising a folk linguistic approach and engaging with its use in novel-writing. It is argued that discussions by contemporary Australian authors about their approaches to writing and voicing characters, and the actual voices authors give to their characters can be used as data to gain new understandings of what language forms have social meanings within AuE. The value of this analytical approach is then illustrated with interview and text extracts from one Australian author, revealing that this type of analysis provides insights into both the folk linguistic understandings of an author and how language variation is employed within the fiction series to index local types. It is concluded that such an approach can be generalised to better understand variation in AuE as accessed by other language-focussed professions and their differing conceptualisations of language, as well as to further understand variation in other varieties of English, and in other languages.

A Context-Based Approach to the Identification of Hedging Devices and Features of Writer-Reader Relationship in Academic Publications

Studies into stance-taking in scholarly publications remain inconclusive. Using software programs that employ predetermined lists of items to analyze data from large corpora fails to account for the role played by context in stance-taking and limits the possibility of discovering new items. Academic writers’ experience and knowledge, as well as their attitudes towards their subject matter and readers have also tended to be ignored. This paper reports on the development and application of two instruments for identifying hedging devices and features of writer-reader relationship that adopt a broader, context-based approach to the analysis of these aspects of stance. We suggest that these tools enrich our understanding of stance-taking, thus making an innovative and valuable contribution to the field of academic discourse analysis.

The Survival of the Subjunctive in Australian English: Ossification, Indexicality and Stance

Research on the subjunctive in Australian English has typically relied on corpus interrogation to ascertain frequency of occurrence of the target forms across text types. Such work has been valuable in confirming trends in usage, such as the increasing use of the mandative subjunctive and the decline of the were subjunctive, but has yet to explore in detail motivations behind the continued survival of what had widely been described as a moribund variant. Based on syntactic evidence, we distinguish the plain form subjunctive, which includes the traditional mandative subjunctive, from the were subjunctive. Using existing corpus-based results as well as data from additional corpus searches, we suggest that there are two primary factors in the subjunctives continued existence in Australian English; firstly, the presence of a growing set of ossifying subjunctive frames within which the subjunctive is marked, and secondly, the role of the subjunctive in indexing formal-prestigious-standard English style, with the were subjunctive indexing literariness and the plain form subjunctive indexing a stance of power and epistemic authority.