Extra Activities

Below we have given some activities that relate to the units in the first section of Grammar and Context. You can use these to get you thinking about the ideas discussed in Grammar and Context and as supplementary tasks when you are reading the book.

Extra activities for Section A: Introduction

Unit A1 Grammar, grammars and grammaticality
1 Go to a library and find 5 reference grammars. If possible, choose a wide spread of publication dates. For each, find out the following: Who is the intended user? Would you say it is a prescriptive or a descriptive grammar? What sources of examples are used (e.g. are the examples authentic or created)? How do the authors label the approach to grammar that is taken?

2 If you have access to the Internet, search newspapers with your search engine. For example, if you are using Google, use its News Search service. Key in the word ‘grammar’ and find any news articles in which grammar is referred to with reference to language (ignore other meanings as, for example, ‘grammar schools’). What aspects of grammar are being discussed in these articles?
To illustrate, we did a search when we were preparing this activity and found articles (among many others): from The Telegraph (Calcutta, India) which reports on the influence of ‘sloppy grammar’ in business emails; from the Manila Times (the Philippines) in which a response is given to a reader’s query on the use of ‘It is I’ and ‘It is me’; and from The Guardian (the UK) in which the writer of a letter bemoans the ‘bad grammar’ of a senior British academic who said ‘I’ll do it for free’. (What do you think the writer’s objection was?)

Unit A2 Context: some preliminaries
1 Take two newspaper articles about the same story, one on the day when the news story ‘breaks’, and the second some time later. What differences can you identify in the assumptions made about what the readers already know? Are any of these differences related to grammar?

2 Take an everyday speech event in which you are involved; for example, speaking to the cashier in a supermarket, or buying a sandwich at lunchtime. Think about what is said and what is not said in the interaction; in other words, what is taken for granted that will be understood about the context? If possible, record these interactions to check your intuitions.

Unit A3 The local situational context
1 Listen to adults talking to babies and young children, and observe any characteristic grammatical features of their speech. You may have small children in your family or in the family of friends who would be useful for this. If you have the opportunity to make recordings, make sure the participants know you are doing so.

2 Compare the same story reported in a serious and a popular newspaper. What grammatical differences do you observe in the texts?

Unit A4 The wider socio-cultural context
1 If you are a speaker of more than one language, compare the forms of address (Mr, Mrs, Your Honour, love, mate, etc.) in the two languages. Would you say that one of the languages is more formal than the other in this respect?

2 Look at a formal written document that you have received recently (e.g. an insurance certificate, the terms and conditions for a bank account or credit card, the conditions attached to an air ticket). Are there any grammatical features that appear to be characteristic of this kind of document?

Unit A5 Context in approaches to grammar
1 Choose a reference grammar from a library. (Perhaps one of the grammars you used in the first activity for Unit A1 above.) What approach to context is stated in the grammar or can you infer from it?

2 In section A5.5 you saw that Paul Hopper recognised a number of ‘routines’ in a stretch of monologue. Take a short text from a specialised area you are familiar with and underline what you would consider to be examples of routines used in this text. Then take another from a specialised area you are not familiar with and try to do the same thing. How easy is it to do this? What are the implications of this?

Unit A6 Presenting a view of the world through grammatical choices
1 Find a newspaper article that appears to you to take a particular stance on a story. (For example, it might be from a newspaper that generally takes a pro- or anti-government line.) Consider the way in which transitivity is used to represent the roles of participants. How does the assignment of roles help to create the writer’s position on the story.

2 Take two pieces of academic writing, one from a discipline with which you are familiar, and the other from an unfamiliar discipline. Underline the nominalizations you find in the first page or two. How easy is it for you to ‘unpack’ these nominalizations; that is, to expand them to clarify their meaning?

Unit A7 Expressing interpersonal relations through grammar
1 Take the Introduction and Discussion (or Conclusion) section of a research article. Underline the markers of modality (modal verbs, and adjectives, adverbs and nouns expressing modal meaning). Is there a difference in the number of modality markers in each section? If so, can you suggest why this should be?

2 In unit A7 we focused on reporting verbs to express opinions. However, reporting adjectives (e.g. I was astonished that…; He was sorry that…) and reporting nouns (e.g. assumption, belief, expectation) can also be used. Find a newspaper text that includes reporting of what others have said. Do the reporting verbs, adjectives and nouns chosen suggest that the writer is conveying a particular view of what she or he is reporting?

Unit A8 Standards and varieties
1 Reflect on your own use of spoken and written language. Are there any contexts in which you might be less or more concerned that you are using ‘standard language’? What features of these contexts influence you?

2 If you use email, consider how the language in the messages you receive (or send) differ from what you consider to be ‘standard language’.

Unit A9 Corpus approaches to the study of grammar
1 You can do a simple search of the British National Corpus at:
http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html
Use this facility to explore a grammatical pattern. For example, you might want to discover what prepositions are used before or after a particular noun or adjective. We searched on ‘the weekend’ see if ‘at’ or ‘on’ occurred more commonly before the phrase.

An additional resource is WebCorp at: www.webcorp.org.uk which allows you to treat the World Wide Web as a corpus and search for words or patterns. We got different results searching ‘the weekend’ using this corpus. Why might that be?

You can search a sample of the Collins Cobuild data base at:
http://cobuild.collins.co.uk/CorpusSearch.aspx which also allows you to find out how frequently words co-occur or collocate. By putting ‘weekend’ into the Collocation Sampler you can find out whether ‘at’ or ‘on’ occurs more often.

2 From what you have read about the use of corpora in exploring grammar (and perhaps also based on your own experience), what do you consider to be its strengths and weaknesses?
For the view of a publisher on the usefulness of corpora you can look at:
www.cobuild.collins.co.uk/Pages/boe.aspx
An academic perspective can be gained a:
www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/contents.htm