PAPER #3: MODERN USAGE

For the third essay, you'll become an amateur contemporary linguist, documenting and explaining some distinguishing feature of contemporary English. Your final paper should be 3-5 pages long and documented in the MLA format.

Choose any feature you want, so long as you can document it as an established feature of the language (albeit perhaps an odd feature), and so long as you can expound upon its relationship to broader linguistic issues. Some potentially intriguing options are instances of slang, colloquialisms, regionalisms, jargon, profanity, taboo languages, prestige dialects, difficulties with pronunciation, neologisms and other recent intrusions into the vocabulary, and features of language peculiar to a certain group, such as your own family.

Whatever topic you choose, do your best to contextualize and account for it: Where exactly have you encountered this feature? Who are its speakers and audience, and how do they determine the feature's usage? What does their attitude seem to be toward it? Does the same feature show up in writing, and if so, where? How long has this feature been around, and is it akin to any other peculiar features you're familiar with in the language? Does it challenge conventional notions of linguistic "correctness," and what's your projection for its future? Make sure that your paper defines its subject, describes the phenomenon you're exploring, and analyzes its significance and relationship to other linguistic issues.

Most of your research will come from data you assemble from spoken sources -- that is from your own empirical observations about the living language you encounter from day to day. So as you go about your business over the next three weeks, listen in on conversations, pay attention to song lyrics, and take note of what strike you as the defining characteristics of late twentieth-century American English. This paper invites you to do some sort of primary research, perhaps by taking notes on the language you hear or by conducting an informal survey.

Since contemporary English by its own definition is so current that it hasn't yet been fully or authoritatively documented, you're not going to get much direct help from library sources. I have listed some sources that can provide models of research and give context for the feature you wish to discuss. This list isn't exhaustive, however, so you should use PALS and serendipity to locate additional sources. One good general starting point is William and Mary Morris, Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985) [REF PE1680 .M59 1985]. Another is Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, ed. Paul Beale, 8th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) [REF PE3721 .P3 1984].

If these works encourage your curiosity, you may want to skim through some of the works on American English, dialects, slang and idioms, and other issues relevant to the contemporary English language. You might also get ideas from more "popular" commentaries on usage such as newspaper columns or the occasional language column on the last page of the Atlantic or other current magazines.

Note that for this assignment it may work best to choose a small feature and write about it in depth rather than to tackle a bigger topic that might require a research paper to do it justice.

So as you go about your business over the next several weeks, listen in on conversations, pay attention to song lyrics, and take note of what strike you as the defining characteristics of early twenty-first-century American English.

Here's a list of resources recommended by the research librarians in the Ylvisaker Library.