This third collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written test answers, demonstrates yet again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers may think they have taught them.

The English language—Grammatical aspects

• Indian English is a self-contented system following its own set of rules.

Language, as Spoken by Linguists “There’s a brand-new paper on this issue that has been submitted. We didn’t see the evidence, but we believed it was right.”

• There is only one present-tense form in traditional varieties of people in south-west England.
• In the present tense, the distinction between the uses of ‘have’ as an auxiliary or a normal verb is only possible with habitual meaning, e.g. “He smokes” (a habit).
• Many varieties have the singular form of the verb regardless of the status of the national subject.
• The verb describes the actions of the noun phrase.
• Let me now concentrate intensely on variations in grammar. Linguists studying language variation struggle to maintain an idealised view by adopting various means of describing language as a community possession. There are numerous discrepancies in the format used to illicit distinguishing features of the various varieties.
• Such constructions could be due to influences of spoken languages and cultures, though speakers are grammatical.
• Another source of difference in pronunciation is the population of that country.
• Some varieties form their present particles in the form ‘I go, I went, I have went’.
• ‘mice’ is the plural tense of mouse.
• Deictics are difficult to interpret: nobody knows what time is meant in a note ‘see you there three hours later’ left on one’s unattended writing desk.
• Another feature used is dietics, marking time in relation to present.
• The use of two differing tenses in sentences seems grammatical incorrect.

Genres—Journalism

• News is stories that are timely—the election or the sports game, who will be won or lost is what makes it to the news. Without the element of time, most news stories would have nothing to base on.
• In the seventieth century, Britain dominated telegraph cables including programmes by the British Broadcasting Cooperation.
• With telephone, there was an increase in internal communication. Nowadays, television news are broadcasted several or more times a day.
• All news journalists have a self-inflicted deadline in their head and they expected to be evaluated by it. To them getting the scoop is disastrous, although the readers couldn’t careless who gets the scoop.
• The abstract summarises the main points. The lead sentence usually functions as its extract.
• The abstract is crucial in news stories, and double abstractions are frequent—they pack maximum news impact in a short phrase of time.
• Cause and effect is crucial in news stories: for example, from the assigned text we understand that the electrician facing the fine for fraud is the cause of his fraud of 23 years.
• News senders compact news in order to accommodate to time-pressurised readers.
• After reading the news, readers can either become violent or be turned into a frenzy.

Writing techniques

• Process writing gives students a greater sense of ownership. For example, informal evidences can be found in the essay writings of an Indian and Nigerian student, illustrating written texts that do not conform to other academic readers. This can be argued that history of English writing in this manner indicates that cultural factors play an important role in discourse pattern.
• Process writing ignores cultural conditioning of writing practices, and so many cultural cliches were soon discovered in the students’ writing.
• Written language demands that specific linguistic knowledge of the English language hence they need to be taught. Without this knowledge, abstract or sometimes condensed terms found in genres (as in ‘the precipitation of the solid’ in physics genre) pupils would be baffled or even put off by the English language.
• Since a vocabulary and style of technical English may be detrimental to a student’s learning, there shouldn’t be any hard and fast rules concerning teaching of genres but rather based on a student’s level of education and the context of the situation (in this case whether the word is abstract or can be easily explained.)
• Spelling is intricately related to writing, I believe.

More to come...

	Rock, Paper, Scissors, Computational Linguist, Nasal-Ingressive Voiceless Velar Trill, Chomsky—A New Game for Every Linguist—Phlange Kadigan
	Preliminary Studies in the Lexicology of Imaginary Language—Dr. I.R. Superordinate
	SpecGram Vol CLVII, No 3 Contents