Laura L. Paterson

Grammar and the English National Curriculum

In 1998 the regulatory body for the National Curriculum, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, acknowledged that there was ‘widespread uncertainty’ over the grammar requirements of the English Curriculum. In this paper I argue that the QCA still has not addressed this uncertainty. I analyse the 1999 and 2011 Primary English Curricula, alongside the 2008 Secondary English Curriculum and show that the QCA grammar guidelines lack specificity, with no clear definitions for key terms such as ‘standard English’ or ‘morphology’, further compounding the perceived uncertainty. I argue that this directly contradicts the QCAs acknowledgement that younger teachers may not have been taught a standardised framework for grammar in their own schooling, making the absence of technical definitions and clear guidelines highly significant. Although the QCA may be aware of uncertainties surrounding grammar teaching, their guidelines in the English National Curriculum do not provide a clear account of what pupils must learn about grammar.

British Pronoun Use, Prescription, and Processing

aura Louise Paterson’s book entitled as British Pronoun Use, Prescription and Processing gives a very compelling, lucid and indepth analysis of the term epicene pronoun, which is defined as a pronoun which does not convey gender or sex information and is coindexed with a singular noun phrase referring to an animate being. The book targets for linguistic and non-linguistic readership and also designed for students and it aims at chronologically giving a survey of epicene pronouns and proposes the Homonymy Theory, an analysis of different varieties of English.

Opposition as victimhood in newspaper debates about same-sex marriage:

In this article, we take a queer linguistics approach to the analysis of data from British newspaper articles that discuss the introduction of same-sex marriage. Drawing on methods from critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics, we focus on the construction of agency in relation to the government extending marriage to same-sex couples, and those resisting this. We show that opponents to same-sex marriage are represented and represent themselves as victims whose moral values, traditions and civil liberties are being threatened by the state. Specifically, we argue that victimhood is invoked in a way that both enables and permits discourses of implicit homophobia.

Does money talk equate to class talk? Audience responses to poverty porn in relation to money and debt

This chapter focuses on transcripts collected for the Benefits Street project at Sheffield Hallam University, which elicited audience responses to clips of poverty porn programming. We conducted four focus groups with members of the public from different social backgrounds across the north and Midlands of England and asked our participants what they thought of the representations of the working class that were shown on screen. Using techniques from corpus linguistics (specifically the use of semantic tagging software) and discourse analysis, we focus here on how our participants used terms associated with money and debt. Our analysis aims to ascertain whether talk of money in relation to benefits claimants actually equates to talk about their social class.