Non-sexist Language Policy and the Rise (and Fall?) of Combined Pronouns in British and American Written English

This paper focuses on the use of combined pronouns (s/he, his or her, him/her, etc.) as an example of late twentieth-century non-sexist language reform which had an overt democratizing aim. Within the scope of second-wave feminism, the use of combined pronouns increased the visibility of women in discourse by encouraging the use of feminine pronouns (she, her, hers) alongside masculine pronouns (he, him, his). Despite their promotion, however, the use of combined pronouns is relatively rare. This paper uses the LOB and Brown families of corpora to diachronically and synchronically study patterns in the use of combined pronouns in written American (AmE) and British English (BrE) from the 1930s to the early 2000s. The analysis not only determines what forms these patterns take, but questions whether combined pronouns are influenced by (a combination of) syntax and/or semantics, and questions whether combined pronouns are really democratic at all

Towards a grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots:Database design and technical solutions

This paper presents a newly constructed corpus of sound-to-spelling mappings in medieval Scots, which stems from the work of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. We have developed a systematic approach to the relationships between individual spellings and proposed sound values, and recorded these mutual links in a relational database. In this paper, we introduce the theoretical underpinnings of sound-to-spelling and spelling-to-sound mappings, and show how a Scots root morpheme undergoes grapho-phonological parsing, the analytical procedure that is employed to break down spelling sequences into sound units. We explain the data collection and annotation for the FITS Corpus (Alcorn et al., forthcoming), drawing attention to the extensive meta-data which accompany each analysed unit of spelling and sound. The database records grammatical and lexical information about the root, the positional arrangement of segments within the root, labels for the nuclei, vowels and consonants, the morphological context, and extra-linguistic detail of the text a given root was taken from (date, place and text type). With this wealth of information, the FITS corpus is capable of answering complex queries about the sound and spelling systems of medieval Scots. We also suggest how our methodology can be transferred to other non-standardised spelling systems

Learning from Ninjas: young people’s films as a lens for an expanded view of literacy and language

This article examines young people’s films to provide insights about language and literacy practices. It offers a heuristic for thinking about how to approach data that is collectively produced. It tries to make sense of new ways of knowing that locate the research in the field rather than in the academic domain. The authors develop a lens for looking at films made by young people that acknowledge multiple modes and materiality within their meaning-making practices. We make an argument about the cultural politics of research, to consider how the language and literacy practices of young people are positioned. We argue for more consideration of how language and literacy appear entangled within objects and other stuff within young people’s media productions, so as to trouble disciplinary boundaries within and beyond literacy and language studies

Mann and gender in Old English prose : a pilot study

It has long been known that OE mann was used in gender-neutral as well as gender-specific contexts. Because of the enormous volume of its attestations in Old English prose, the more precise usage patterns of mann remain, however, largely uncharted, and existing lexicographical tools provide only a basic picture. This article aims to present a preliminary study of the various uses of mann as attested in Old English prose, particularly in its surprisingly consistent use by an individual author, namely that of the ninth-century Old English Martyrology. Patterns emerging from this text are then tested against other prose material. Particular attention is paid to gender-specific usage, examples of which are shown to be exceptional for a word which largely occurs in gender-neutral contexts.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe