David Crystal Research Articles

Bridging the gap between theory and implementation: National language policy and documentation of mother tongue

Language is an essential aspect of identity and culture, playing a significant role in shaping a nation's socio-political landscape. This is why nations are continuously making effort to preserve their indigenous languages. This paper investigates the grey area of theory and implementation of the national language policy in the preservation, revitalization, documentation of mother tongue. It discusses the challenges such as lack of adequate instructional materials and qualified teachers in indigenous language, facing indigenous languages in Nigeria and how the implementation of language national language policy can promote mother tongue revitalization beyond the classroom. The paper adopts Language ecology model and David Crystal's theory of language revitalization to investigate the study. The paper adopts descriptive analysis methodology, which will use current and historical data to identify gaps in the study. The paper concludes that bridging the gap between theory and implementation of national language policy in Nigeria is a complex but a necessary and essential national task that involves the government allocating resources to produce adequate instructional materials and training teachers to be qualified in teaching indigenous languages. Also government and stakeholders should intensify efforts outside the classroom, preserving mother tongue and revitalizing endangered languages requires a multifaceted approach that extends well beyond the classroom, which involves fostering a cultural environment where the language is valued and used in daily life, creating intergenerational connections, leveraging technology and documenting linguistic resources.

ПРЕДЛОГИ В ГРАММАТИЧЕСКОМ СТРОЕ АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА: СЕМАНТИКО-ФУНКЦИОНАЛЬНЫЙ АСПЕКТ

The article gives a semantic-functional analysis of the preposition as a part of speech in the grammatical structure of the English language and considers the views on the nature and linguistic status of prepositions of various scholars: from O. Jespersen, A.I. Smirnitsky and I.I. Meshchaninov to modern English linguist David Crystal and others. The semantic and structural characteristics of prepositions are highlighted. The authors note such a feature of the linguistic characteristics of prepositions as the inability to apply traditional concepts of grammatical and lexical meaning to them, which leads to controversial issues in the conceptual understanding of prepositions in linguistics. The article analyzes the key moments of the semantics and functioning of English prepositions: the implementation of the relations of homonymy, synonymy and antonymy in the system of prepositions, their role in the syntax of the English language. The final part of the article deals with the cognitive and linguo-methodological aspects of English prepositions.

The lexeme <i>chino</i> in Mexican Spanish

In accordance with the affirmation expressed by the British linguist David Crystal that «language is the primary index, or symbol, or register of identity», this article examines the meaning of the word chino in Mexico as «curly hair» which, unlike all Spanish-speaking countries, has a private and peculiar meaning to this nation, being the hallmark of its identity. Different sources, both lexicographical and theoretical, are analyzed regarding this meaning and it is concluded that this meaning has to do with the miscegenation that occurred in New Spain, particularly among Indian women with black men, who, according to different names of the castes, derived in the so-called «chino» due to the predominance of the black gene in the blood, which gave them the African physical characteristics, among which is, precisely, the curly hair, and, based on this distinctive feature, the meaning of «curly hair» became general and began to be used to name all people with curly hair without necessarily having African features, a designation that is still actively used among Mexicans.

Discourse of Women's Body Construction in Advertising and Promotion "Lovely Nia" and "Alitaren"


 
 
 
 The emergence of women who are often the subject of visualization of mass media advertisements is largely due to the perception of the low status of women in the institutions adopted by our society. Ads that standardize women's ideal bodies prove how men (especially in ad production) can create women to fit their "sexy or beautiful" fantasies. Advertising as a mass communication system, now tends to become a parameter and implementation that creates gender biases and preserving the construction of the female body. So that it’s considered not excessive regarding David Crystal's statement that advertising is the most colossal cultural product, when viewed from the perspective of ideology, morals and aesthetics. Using Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, this study explores how 'Lovely Nia' discusses the construction of the female body in advertisements and social media promotions 'Lovely Nia' and 'Alitaren' how the concept of patriarchal ideology plays a role in this construction. The findings of this study are to make the concept of beauty an important asset that must be owned and cultivated by women and the discourse on the construction of the female body makes women still positioned as objects, especially when women have become wives. 'Lovely Nia' and 'Alitaren' still apply the malegaze concept in their advertisements and promotions both offline and online. Even though women place themselves as subjects who have full power over their body shape. The absence of men from advertising and social media promotions does not promise the release of women from patriarchal culture.
 
 
 

That's the Ticket for Soup! Victorian Views on Vocabulary as Told in the Pages of "Punch" by David Crystal

That's the Ticket for Soup! Victorian Views on Vocabulary as Told in the Pages of "Punch" by David Crystal

Rhythm: Types, Hierarchy and Language Diversity

This article deals with the factors which cause the emergence of rhythm, its types, hierarchy and the relation of rhythm to life and the human language diversity. According to Aristotle “all types of rhythm are measured by certain movements”. So all events and processes connected with rhythm are rhythmical in nature. Rhythm is a regular reiteration of identical cases, processes and events within the boundaries of time and space. Rhythm is the form of regular motion. However, rhythm is not the result of motion. It is just the movement itself. All types of rhythm or movement, to our mind, are based on energy the absence of which excludes movements, rhythms, accordingly then life, human language, as well as language diversity. Thus, studying rhythm, its types and systemic hierarchy, to our mind, enables us to reveal the mechanism of transition from inanimate nature to animate one, on the one hand, and creation of the styduing diversity principle of nature, as well as language diversity, on the other hand.
 The main task of a linguistic scholar, as defined by David Crystal, is great interest. To this linguist “the main task of the linguistic scholar is not to improve the language teaching situation … etc., his task is basically to study and understand the general principles upon which all languages are built. What are the “design features” of human language? What are the differences between languages? How can we describe and classify this? How far are they fundamental? What concepts do we have before we can begin to talk about language at all” (D.Crystal, 1997).
 Our aim, accordingly, is to make an attempt to study the types of rhythm, its systemic hierarchy and the relation of rhythm to emergence of life and language diversity.

Exploring Conversation with David Crystal’s Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works (2020)

What can be considered a successful and meaningful conversation? Are we truly good at it? The reason David Crystal has written Let’s Talk proves the topic’s on-going universality and significance since being a good conversationalist is quite demanding. For this reason, this book proves to be a goldmine of gripping and insightful observations of various aspects of conversation throughout history. It encompasses quite a plethora of topics, such as greetings and farewells, clichés, turn-taking, simultaneous feedback or interruption, semantic fuzziness, parenthesis, the choice of conversation topics, storytelling, telephone and online etiquette, vocal and visual cues in conversation, style, cultural conflicts, breaking maxims of conversation, and the future of conversation.

Stylistic variation of prosodic patterns of a linguistic persona

This paper aims to study phonostylistic variation of prosodic characteristics of a linguistic persona. The new aspect brought to the field is the focus not only on pitch and speech rate but also on voice quality prosodic aspects of a linguistic persona. The subject was a world-famous British linguist David Crystal whose recordings of lecture and interview were used as the material for this study. The data suggest wide variability of practically every prosodic feature. Among them, pitch minimum, pitch range, loudness median and shimmer values proved to be most constant features of the linguistic persona. The other prosodic values underwent changes due to the shift from the modal voice in the interview to a more arduous voice in the lecture thus reflecting different pragmatics goals of commuication. Prosodic variation range of the linguistic persona in question turned out wider than the average one.

David Crystal em conversa sobre conversas

Nesta resenha, abordamos criticamente os apontamentos feitos pelo professor David Crystal na live Let’s talk: How English Conversation Works, proferida durante o evento Abralin ao Vivo, organizado pela Associação Brasileira de Linguística e parceiros. Levantamos os principais conceitos discutidos pelo professor, relacionando a realidade da língua inglesa com a realidade da língua portuguesa falada no Brasil. Entretanto, também colocamos nossas reflexões sobre os diversos assuntos abordados. Na live, o professor falou sobre como as conversas funcionam, desde interações mais formais até interações cotidianas, abordando também a maneira como elas são realizadas (pessoalmente, virtualmente, entre outros). Muito mais do que uma palestra, a live foi uma conversa entre o professor David Crystal e a professora Anne Wichmann, que bateram um papo sobre o ato de bater papo.

Speaking in Shakespeare's Voice: A Guide for American Actors by Linda Gates

Reviewed by: Speaking in Shakespeare's Voice: A Guide for American Actors by Linda Gates Julie Foh Speaking in Shakespeare's Voice: A Guide for American Actors. By Linda Gates. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019; pp. 248. Providing practical exercises, historical context, and the author's personal insight, Speaking in Shakespeare's Voice: A Guide for American Actors seeks to be an all-inclusive voice textbook for US actors who want to perform Shakespeare. Gates, who is head of voice in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University and a very accomplished vocal coach, begins by making the argument that many American actors presently working in theatre "are still uncertain about how to perform Shakespeare's text" (3), and, with this book, she will "help all actors, but especially American actors, build the vocal skills and confidence necessary to speak Shakespeare's text and to communicate it to an audience" (3–4). To that end, the book provides instruction on the physical aspects of vocal production, the sounds of "Standard American English" (4), elements of Shakespeare's rhetoric and verse structure, and how to use these tools in performance. Additionally, Gates includes an appendix listing monologues and scenes that actors might use to practice these skills in a classroom setting or for an audition. After an introduction outlining the history of Shakespeare performance in the United States, the structure of the book follows the physical process of using language to communicate. The first three chapters include theory and exercises addressing the physical actions of voice work: breath, phonation, and speech sounds (vowels and consonants). The fourth and fifth chapters deal with those elements of voice work united into language: rhetoric and structure (verse and prose). The sixth chapter shifts back from the practical skills of performance of Shakespeare's text to historical context, asking the question, "Which text is Shakespeare's text?" (189). Interwoven throughout the entire book are excerpts from Shakespeare's writings, used as examples for the skills being practiced. Gates has chosen to draw all of these excerpts from Open Source Shakespeare, a free, online compilation of the Bard's works. In explaining her choice to write this book with American actors in mind, Gates describes a number of circumstances under which American actors might have soured on Shakespeare—a dry English class or a bad rehearsal process perhaps. She references the belief, held by some, that only classically trained British actors possess the ability to perform his text well. She seeks to prove to American actors that Shakespeare can belong to them as well, and one piece of evidence she offers to that end is that the pronunciation of Elizabethan British English (or "Original Pronunciation") was closer to the pronunciation of contemporary American English than it is to contemporary British English (by which she means Standard British, otherwise known as Received Pronunciation [RP]). There is evidence to support this assertion, and she cites David Crystal's research into Original Pronunciation several times in the book. So perhaps American actors speaking in their own voices can come close to speaking in Shakespeare's voice. In her chapter on "Breathing for Shakespeare's Text," she includes physical exercises for breath support and capacity so that actors may ultimately communicate longer, denser thoughts. She also describes the difference in function between rhetorical and grammatical uses of punctuation. A rhetorical use of punctuation will tell the speaker when to breathe so that the meaning of the thought is not interrupted by an inhalation. Also in this chapter, Gates advocates for a use of upward inflections right before those catch breaths at pieces of punctuation to keep the thought going until one reaches an end-stop. In her chapter on "Voice Work for Shakespeare," she includes physical exercises for resonance and for finding "optimal pitch" (38). These are common practices in the world of voice training; they come from a prescriptive approach to breath, voice, and text work. In telling the actor when precisely to breathe, when to upward inflect, and where in their pitch/resonance range to speak, Gates lays out a set of rules that could limit the range of the actor's choices. In her chapter on...

The Story of Be: A Verb's-Eye View of the English Language and Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar by David Crystal

The Story of Be: A Verb's-Eye View of the English Language and Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar by David Crystal

The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan

Reviewed by: The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion ed. by Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan Heather Hirschfeld Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, editors. The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion. oxford up, 2016 775 pp. michel foucault's celebrated query—"what is an author?"—has organized four decades of scholarship on the definition and function of the writer in relation to his or her contexts. Here, in assessing Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan's imposing collection of essays, which serves as the third of the three interconnected print publications comprising the New Oxford Shakespeare, we should adjust Foucault's question slightly. "What is a companion?" we might ask. And to continue the quibble, "what is an authorship companion?" In the Shakespearean lexicon, a companion is distinctly human: an associate, an aide or comrade, or a rogue or rascal (David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary & Language Companion, Penguin Books, 2002, 86). Shakespeare's usage abbreviates a more expansive set of meanings available in the early modern period, including applications to objects rather than people. In 1533, a companion could be "an inanimate object, abstract quality, etc., regarded as company for a person," and, by 1621, it was understood as "a handbook or reference book" and, more particularly, as a vade mecum, "a book or manual suitable for carrying about with one" (OED II.9.b, 10.a). At more than 750 pages, the hefty Authorship Companion is unlikely to be carried about, even by the most dedicated scholars, who will surely wish to consult, if not necessarily adopt or endorse, its positions on the canon and chronology of Shakespeare's written work. (These positions, some of which have garnered the attention of the popular press, include the diminution of Shakespeare's hand and the introduction of Christopher Marlowe's in the three Henry VI plays, as well as the ascription to shakespeare of parts of The Tragedy of M. Arden of Faversham, Edward III, and Lewis Theobald's 1727 The Double Falsehood, reclaimed here as The History of Cardenio (see, for instance, Christopher D. Shea, "New Oxford Shakespeare Edition Credits Christopher Marlowe as a Co-author," New York Times, 24 October 2016). In its comprehensive articulation of these positions, the volume does [End Page 189] double duty: it serves not only as a guide to its readers but as the essential accompaniment to the other volumes of the New Oxford Shakespeare, particularly the Modern Critical Edition (hereafter, MCE; edited by Gary Taylor et al., Oxford UP, 2016). All twenty-five of its chapters, in other words, work to explain and justify the texts that comprise the MCE; they revolve around questions about who wrote, or who wrote which parts of, plays associated with Shakespeare's name since the 1590s. Attention to these questions distinguishes the 2016 Authorship Companion from Taylor and Stanley Wells's 1987 Textual Companion, the complementary volume to the 1986 Oxford Shakespeare: The Collected Works, which devoted more time and space to the history of editing shakespeare than to the history—and contemporary computational practices—of attributing works to him. The focus on the latter, according to Taylor and Egan, puts the "authorship" in the Authorship Companion, and the volume begins with a feisty chapter by Taylor on the nature of writing for the early modern stage. In it Taylor coins the term "artiginality," a neologism drawn from the vocabulary of the early modern guild and meant to capture both the inexorably material conditions of the Renaissance theater and the dramatist's agency and individuality in his work for it. Authorship in Shakespeare's time, Taylor explains, was a craft, one that "transform[ed] already-existing works, already-existing text-things, into recognizably new text-things" (25). The author (in another of Taylor's neologisms) was a "transformaker" (25), and like other early modern artisans or "wrights," he had had a proprietary interest in his labor. These definitions ground the rest of the volume, since they license—even mandate—the attribution of acts and scenes to the dramatists who crafted them. As Taylor writes, "The difference between one wrighter and another should matter to us because it mattered to them" (26). Thus, "modern editors and...

A cognitive pragmatic approach to punctuation

A cognitive pragmatic approach to punctuation

AN OVERVIEW OF THE CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH LANGUAGE: Changes and Perspectives – Interview with David Crystal

In this unprecedented interview, the English linguist David Crystal outlines the lexical and morphological changes within the English language, particularly in the last decade. In addition, he discusses neologisms incorporated to the English language (British), especially those originating from Brazilian Portuguese. Finally, Crystal talks about the growth of varieties of global English and, also, the phenomenon entitled: "New English(es)".

Code Switching as The Medium of Solidarity in ‘Ola Bola’

The purpose of the study is to investigate code switching (CS) exchanges in the movie Ola Bola; one of the highest box office movies in the Malaysian history in 2016, with a gross collection of the ticket selling of almost RM16 million (Finas, 2016). The study analysed the reasons why Malaysians; as aptly portrayed by the multi-racial characters in this particular movie, code switch in their daily interactions based on the theory proposed by David Crystal (1987). Another part of this study identified the types of code switchings used in this movie from the categories proposed by Shana Poplack (1980). Discussions from the findings show how the usage of code switchings depicts the spirit of solidarity, patriotism and unity in a multi-racial society; from Malaysian perspective.

David Crystal, Making a Point: The pernickety story of English punctuation

David Crystal, a renowned linguist and the author of over 700 books and articles, published Making a Point: The pernickety story of English punctuation in 2015. After diverse Stories of English (2004, 2011), he chose to relate the story of English punctuation, and to answer the following questions, which he raises in the introduction: Who were the people who introduced punctuation in the English language? Why did they do it? How did their invention evolve over the centuries? What is happening...

Prescriptivism in English literature?

One of the things we discovered in the course of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project is that usage guides are predominantly produced by non-specialists. There are linguists, too, who wrote usage guides – David Crystal, for instance, Pam Peters and most recently Stephen Pinker – but authors are very often journalists and novelists. Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), whoseThe King's Englishwas published posthumously in 1997, is a good example, and so is Rebecca Gowers, who revised and updated her great-grandfather'sPlain Wordsin 2014. Examples of journalists-turned-usage-guide-writers are Simon Heffer (Strictly English, 2010) and Oliver Kamm (Accidence Will Happen, 2015). Writing is their job, so it is not surprising that novelists and journalists are drawn to language prescription as well. They may not be linguists in the strict sense, but they should be considered language specialists all the same.

Is she mad at me?: tone and conversation in text messaging

The average American college student text messages constantly throughout the day. According to a Boston area Verizon retailer, it is not uncommon for young adults (an age range he did not define) to send 8,000 text messages a month. Texting has become an increasingly more important form of communication in our culture, and our country’s colleges are the hotbeds of linguistic activity and change within this particular medium. Its emergence and popularity have not gone unnoticed in the sociolinguistic community, where text messaging and online conversation have become rich new areas of linguistic data yet unexplored. Most famous in this discussion is British linguist David Crystal, whose recent research, culminating in his 2008 book Txting: The Gr8 Deb8, has incited discussion and suggested fascinating conclusions about the sophistication of this means of communication and its influence on the English language. Crystal writes a great deal about the acronyms and abbreviations within the grammar of the Short Messaging Service (SMS), but in this paper I focused on the relationship of tone and punctuation, a topic that emerged out of a conversation with a fellow student. She was struggling to compose a message to a recent acquaintance (and potential romantic interest), and could not decide on the proper end punctuation for the attitude she wanted to project. The message content, something mundane about her hometown in Maryland, wasn’t the problem; it was deciding the appropriate way to finish the message off, to apply a tone. We ran through the list of options and discussed all of their implications, trying to identify which one would best convey her overall attitude: interested and engaged, but definitely light and casual. After trying a few different combinations of haha’s and exclamation points we landed on something satisfactory and she sent it off. Reflecting on it later, I realized that we had just achieved a pretty complex linguistic act. With limited resources we managed to make sure her recipient knew how she felt; her message served as a vehicle for an emotional transfer. Text messages that are pure content are all business, just an instant communication of needs to another person who could be in any place and engaged in any activity. Without explicit markers of tone, such a message is bold and possibly disconcerting, and not at all analogous to face-to-face conversation, in which politeness is paramount. American college students therefore employ punctuation and add certain particles in order to avoid ambiguity of tone and preserve standards of politeness in text messaging.

“I Have Lost All Ability To Can”: Is Internet Really Ruining The English Language?

Language is an important instrument through which members of a given community express their thoughts, feelings and emotions; it is one of the most fundamental means of human communication and a primary object of the study of linguistics. It is perhaps no more than trite to suggest that the internet has become a fact of social life globally. However, proving this fact needs an ordered frame of reference. Internet linguistics is yet another domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist, David Crystal. It studies “new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and other New Media, such as Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging”, (Wikipedia). There have arisen great disputations on whether or not the use of the Internet is hindering language development. This paper examines these arguments in relation to students’ proficiency in language use, generally. To what extent can one generalize the findings in other climes within the Nigerian context? Using both the Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Braddock communication model, the study examines “ sent ” and “ received ” SMS and e-mails from the sample population, with a view to determining the impact on the users’ proficiency level in English language.

Multimodal Humor in Plenary Lectures in English and in Spanish

AbstractHumor is present in most instances of human to human interaction and has often been studied by discourse analysis (Long and Graesser 2009). These studies have taken several perspectives but have often ignored the multimodal aspect of humor even more if the genres selected have been in oral academic discourse. In this paper we focus on a genre that has rarely been studied, the conference plenary lecture. Taking as a theoretical model Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) we look at the semiotic resources employed by two senior researchers: one Spanish, Dr. Jose Manuel Blecua and one British, Dr David Crystal. They were plenary speakers in two different conferences. In their speeches Dr. Blecua dealt with Spanish as a Foreign language and Dr. Crystal with English as a Foreign language. Although there does not seem to have been any point of contact between them, their lectures show a number of similarities especially with regard to the semiotic resources they use in order to produce humor.