340353 UE Functional grammar and stylistics English (2024S)

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.” (Oscar Wilde)
“The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.” (Chinua Achebe)

In this course we do grammar—and we’ll do it in style; (here we go) ... “Bring, brang, brung.” … … … (ah, ... feeling transported right into the thick of it?) ... some would call this conjugation 'UNEDUCATED', 'SUBSTANDARD', or 'NONSTANDARD' … others 'LEGITIMATE', 'REGIONAL', or 'ARTISTIC LICENSE'.

What about you? “Context,” you say? “Following my heart ...,” you say? And what about “broughten” (and dare we say “bringed”?) … … … or, and now for something completely different, what about “bad, ... badder, baddest”? Check it out and share your thoughts with us in class.

Each week, we will dissect and discuss, contort and retort, ask and gasp at the English language continuum and all its rules, regulations and ridiculousness. It’ll be a celebration of languaging, masquerading as a passive-aggressive whinge about words and weirdness. There are no apolitical classrooms, and our course will provide enough room for ALL THE ENGLISHES …—we will counter artificial notions of correctness and superiority.

The idea of CORRECTNESS usually presupposes that usages in grammar, pronunciation or meaning can be RIGHT or WRONG according to some ideal standard (or—and even worse—to make language use conform to one’s own ideals of beauty, efficiency, civility, etc.). That is not to say that we are libertines: But, in our class, we determine rules of grammaticality by actual usage and patterns. “He’s a quick sort of a bairn is that.”—a perfect sentence; and a beautiful one, innit? So is: “Irks care the cropfull bird?” ———Thus, in this course, we will have to discuss DIALECTICAL and STYLISTIC VARIATION, ACCEPTABILITY and APPROPRIATENESS.

In our class, you will experience a collaborative and supportive environment. Current edited writing and broadcast spoken word will serve as our chief metric (our yardstick) when assessing your work. (“The only evidence we have of what makes up the English language is how people write and speak it.” —Oliver Kamm)

Learning objectives:
(i) to improve your grammatical knowledge (and thus perhaps turn you into grammaficionados and grammartists);
(ii) to broaden your stylistic repertoire.

On the menu?
Present and future tense (Let us not look back. The past is gone.). Conditional clauses. Purpose, reason and result clauses. Stative verbs. Gerunds and infinitives. Subjunctives. Punctured punctuation. Adjectives and adverbs. Connectors. Phrasal verbs. Idioms and expressions. Morphologically similar but distinct words. 'Not-so-close' friends (language transfer). A free wish.
Weekly group performances on selected topics, discussion of issues (based on real-life examples), exercises in and out of class. Individual, pair and group work.

So, let’s hit the ground running …