This link on the excellent Linguistics Research Digest blog takes a look at the "people first" movement in Politically Correct (PC) language reform, which (as Jenny Amos explains) involved a switch in the type of noun phrase being used to label social groups, from pre-modified noun phrases to post-modified noun phrases. Pre-to-the-what-now?
It's quite a simple idea. If you look at a noun phrase such as disabled people, the adjective disabled premodifies the noun people. The people first approach would be to shift the noun to the front and add the modification afterwards in the form of a prepositional phrase, so it becomes people with disabilities. The argument here was that the former version placed emphasis on the condition - and by extension defined the people by their disability - while the latter foregrounded the people themselves, with the disability coming after.Jenny Amos's blog post then looks at some interesting research by Helena Halmari into the use of such terms in news reporting.
PC is clearly about more than just rearranging words; it's primarily about rearranging ways of thinking about different groups in society, and specifically it's about removing offensive and derogatory words from the language. The arguments about PC were recently surveyed in an interesting Observer article by Miranda Sawyer, where she looked at some of the background to the PC movement and its more modern manifestations: Twitter spats, rape "jokes" and the bandying around of terms like mong and sket "for a laugh". If you're looking for material to bolster your ENGA3 Language Discourses understanding, go no further.
Black British English vs MLE
The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...
-
As part of the Original Writing section of the NEA, students will be required to produce a commentary on their piece. This blog post will pr...
-
As lots of students are embarking on the Language Investigation part of the Non-Exam Assessment, I thought it might be handy to pick up a fe...
-
When Dan asked what he should post about next on this blog, one of the most common responses was this, the World Englishes topic. Maybe ...