English Grammar Day 2023

A day of talks and discussion on aspects of English grammar

Are you sat down or sitting down while reading this? Have you got or do you have a preference for one form over the other? English has a number of ways of expressing the same concept, and with approximately 400 million mother-tongue speakers and an estimated 1.4 billion non-native speakers it has become a diverse, flexible language that continues to adapt, evolve – and provoke strong reactions. You only need to search for #grammar on Twitter to see what we mean!

Developments in the National Curriculum for England have placed grammar in schools at centre stage once more, and divided opinion among politicians, teachers, linguists and journalists, as well as the wider public, on how and whether it should be taught. How have teachers implemented changes to their teaching and learning programmes to adapt to the new syllabuses, assessment criteria and tests? What resources are available for students, teachers and the general public to learn more about English grammar, and how reliable are they? What is or should be the role of English grammar teaching in schools today and why is this so controversial? What do teachers, professionals, academics and the general public feel is the cultural and educational significance of knowledge about the language?

Join us for a day of talks and discussion, and feel free to ask our panel of experts to explore any aspect of English grammar from ain’t to innit.

Presented by University College London, the British Library and the University of Oxford, with the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas.

Programme

09:30-09:50	Registration
09:50-10:00	Welcome & Introduction
10:00-10:30	Sylvia Shaw, Lost in Transcription? The representation of parliamentary speech in writing
10:30-11:00	Julia Snell, Does correcting children’s spoken grammar improve their writing?
11:00-11:45	Coffee/tea*
11:45-12:15	Steven Dryden, They, Them, We, Us
12:15-12:45	Guyanne Wilson, Caribbean Englishes in the Standard English debate
12:45-14:00	Lunch break*
14:00-14:30	Joanna Gavins, Using linguistics to help tackle plastics pollution
14:30-15:00	Susie Dent, Word imperfect
15:00-15:45	Coffee/tea*
15:45-17:00	‘Any Questions’-style panel discussion, chaired by John Mullan, UCL Submit your questions during the first coffee break!
17:00	Close

*Coffee and tea is included but lunch is not provided. UCL has numerous food outlets within a short walking distance.

How to find the venue

• The Christopher Ingold Auditorium is in the UCL Chemistry Building on Gordon Street, opposite the Bloomsbury Theatre.
• The nearest tube stations are Euston and Euston Square. Alternatives are Warren Street, Goodge Street or Russell Square.
• From Euston, cross the Euston Road at the West end of the Euston concourse, and turn up Gordon Street.
• From Euston Square, turn into Gower Place, and turn right at the next junction, and you will be on Gordon Street.
• The UCL Chemistry (Christopher Ingold) Building will be on your left before Gordon Square.
• When you enter the building the Auditorium is on the ground floor on your right after the turnstiles.

Abstracts

Susie Dent Word Imperfect

In this talk I’ll primarily be looking at the way in which language evolves through mistakes, and how the golden age of English, which many believe existed in the past, is, in fact, illusory. Where there is no formal linguistic government telling us which words we can and can’t use, many English speakers look to the dictionary for linguistic law. But modern lexicography works very differently, and moves to reflect usages which many will regard as incorrect. I’ll be looking at this tension between expectation and reality, and also uncovering some of the mistakes and mishearings of the past (and future) which determine the way we speak.

Steven Dryden (British Library) They, Them, We, Us

Using case studies from cataloguing and exhibition making with British Library collections, Steven Dryden presents a brief history of pronouns, gender and sexual minorities, archive/library catalogues and explores an intersectional future through information science.

Joanna Gavins (Sheffield) Using linguistics to help tackle plastics pollution

‘Many Happy Returns’ is a research project at the University of Sheffield being undertaken by a multidisciplinary team of scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanities researchers. The project aims to enable the development of reusable packaging systems and reduce single-use plastics. Linguistics sits at the heart of the project and we are examining millions of words of linguistic data, gathered from social media, manufacturers’ and retailers’ language, government information, and focus group discussions. Our aim is to understand how people talk about their interactions with plastics and how we can reframe the language we use to encourage reuse. This talk will look at some of the grammatical patterns we have uncovered in our data and what they might reveal about how we conceptualise plastics.

Sylvia Shaw (Westminster) Lost in Transcription? The representation of parliamentary speech in writing

This talk investigates the representation of parliamentary speech in writing for the Hansard, or Official Report of parliament. The ‘verbatim’ report actually makes systematic grammatical and lexical transformations to the original speech of politicians in order to record it in a way that reflects the authority of parliament and allows people to read it with ease. Here I consider exactly how politicians’ speech is altered for the written record, identifying two main concerns with the process. First, that of accuracy and whether changes and omissions can alter the meaning or nuances of what was originally expressed in speech. Second, whether the process of standardisation also eradicates important aspects of individuals’ identities by altering grammatical and lexical variation in their speech.

Julia Snell (Leeds) Does correcting children’s spoken grammar improve their writing?

To what extent does children’s spoken dialect grammar influence their writing? Does correcting pupils’ speech improve their command of written standard English? What consequences might overt correction of spoken grammar have for pupil participation and learning? I’ll addresses these questions by drawing upon a broad range of research data and investigations – primary school children’s writing, video recorded literacy lessons, Ofsted inspection reports, government language policy, and interviews with teachers and pupils – to demonstrate that despite the attention it receives in educational policy and discourse, spoken dialect grammar is not a major issue in relation to developing children’s writing.

Guyanne Wilson (UCL) Caribbean Englishes in the Standard English debate

In the Caribbean, local varieties of English are spoken alongside English-lexicon Creoles. Where in the past the presence of Creole features in Standard English was highly stigmatised, there is increasing evidence for creolisms, i.e. Creole linguistic structures adopted into English (Mair 2002), in English use. This paper considers creolisms in Jamaican and Trinidad and Tobagonian English, focussing on copula forms with predicative and progressive constructions, verbal agreement, and modal variation. The data comprise six text-types of the International Corpus of English, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago components: parliamentary debates, legal cross-examinations, legal presentations, academic writing, news reports and editorials. The results show that, even in formal contexts, creolisms are present in both spoken and written language. The status of these forms – are they Creole or not? – has implications for current understandings of how Standard English varies within the Caribbean region and compared to other Standard Englishes.

English Grammar Day

• The English Grammar Day
• English Grammar Day 2025
• English Grammar Day 2024
• English Grammar Day 2023
• English Grammar Day 2022