Betsy Snider and Professor Doris Dant, Linguistics and English Language

Main text

American English has no official language rules; rather, it has guidelines of what is acceptable and what is not. These guidelines, or prescriptions, are found in grammar books such as usage books, dictionaries, and style guides. Grammar books are created and maintained by editors and grammarians who base their prescriptions on what they observe as acceptable or unacceptable usage based on what occurs in educated texts. Despite the commonality of method, there is great variety and contradiction between what different grammar books prescribe. Nineteenth century grammarian, Goold Brown, once barbed “Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more.”

Yet, even if grammarians limited their reading to peer-reviewed journals, they still could not read enough to get an accurate representation of what is and is not occurring in educated writing. Additionally, the task of tracking the changes in their thousands of prescriptions through those journals would be impossible.
In 2009, Professor Doris Dant, in the Linguistics and English Language department at Brigham Young University, discovered a way to track the changes of prescriptions in educated writing. Using the Chicago Manual of Style as a basis, she set out to prove the effectiveness of her method. She chose The Chicago Manual of Style because it is one of the most popular and thorough reference books of American English. It is so commonly used as a reference book that it is nicknamed by editors “the orange bible.”

Professor Dant and her team studied 322 of Chicago‟s prescriptions in the newly created Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).2 In linguistics terms, a corpus is a body of texts that have been input into a computer for analysis. COCA, published in 2008, was created by BYU professor, Dr. Mark Davies. It is the largest corpus of American English to date, consisting of over 400 million words. COCA allows for searches as simple as discovering the amount of times a given word occurs in the corpus, and for searches as complex as discovering what gerunds occur most often in the construction “pronoun gerund adverb.” Most importantly, COCA is a large enough sample of the language to empirically track prescription usage changes.

My portion of the research was to examine Chicago‟s prescriptions regarding possessives. Possessives deal with spelling, punctuation, and grammar; therefore, they are a perfect example of how corpora can be used to track a variety of prescriptions.

Comparisons are made between Chicago‟s recommendations and one or more conflicting possibilities. Errors in the corpus are dealt with systematically. For each result, a random sampling of 100 is taken. The percentage of errors found within that 100 are then subtracted from the total. Search strings resulting in error percentages over 10 percent are discarded. Overall, Chicago‟s prescriptions fell into three categories.

One, Chicago‟s prescriptions are clearly being ignored, as in section 7.18, in which Chicago gives the “general rule” for forming possessives. This “rule” states that the possessive is formed by adding ’s to the end of a word, including words already ending in s. The remaining rules on possessives are exceptions to and clarifications of this rule. The search done in COCA challenged only the statement that words ending in s should take ’s rather than only an apostrophe. Results that fit into Chicago‟s exceptions were counted as errors. In COCA, there are 37,208 nouns ending in s that form the possessive with ’s, and there are 238,290 nouns ending in s that form the possessive without the additional s. This means that Chicago‟s prescription is followed only 13.51 percent of the time. Interestingly enough, earlier editions of Chicago recommend the exact opposite of their current rule. In section 7.23, Chicago explains that the practice of “omitting the possessive s” is no longer the common practice and therefore they changed their prescription to reflect usage.3 According to COCA, however, at the time of Chicago‟s publication (2003), “omitting the possessive s” was actually on the increase, having increased by 7.84 percent since 1990. However, since Chicago‟s new recommendation, the practice of “omitting the possessive s” dropped by 15 percent, though it is still used 7 times as much as Chicago‟s new recommendation.

Two, Chicago‟s prescriptions are clearly being followed, as in section 7.20 which states that words of two or more syllables ending in an “eez” sound should omit the possessive s (e.g. Xerxes‟ tale). Chicago‟s prescription is definitely in-line with edited text, which follow Chicago‟s rule roughly 90 percent of the time. That is, out of 1,204 times that a two or more syllable word ending in an „eez‟ sound uses the possessive in COCA, 1,078 times it omits the possessive s.

Three, Chicago‟s prescription and a competing form are being used in nearly equal proportions, as in section 7.21, which states that words ending in a silent s should omit the possessive s. To perform this search, a list of words was created, which, according to Merriam-Webster‟s on-line dictionary,4 end in a silent s. The results were carefully examined to exclude exceptions. The possessive s is omitted roughly 61 percent of the time, meaning it is used 39 percent of the time. While this is not an even split, it is close enough that Chicago should recognize the alternate form as generally acceptable.

Professor Dant recently presented some of her findings at ICAME, a corpus linguistics conference, in Hesse, Germany, at which I was present. It was an educating and exciting opportunity to attend presentations of some of the leading minds in my field. I also had the chance to meet the dean of the English Language department at Manchester University where I have been accepted to study for my Master‟s. Professor Dant and her team have submitted a paper for publication in the conference proceedings. Separate from that paper, Professor Dant and I are writing a paper, based on my findings, for submission in the peer-reviewed journal, Applied Linguistics. Finally, Professor Dant will be presenting all her findings to the editorial staff of The Chicago Manual of Style.

References

• Goold Brown, Grammar of English Grammars (1851), quoted in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1994), 10a
• Mark Davies. Corpus of Contemporary American English. (Brigham Young University, 2008), www.americancorpus.org.
• University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 7.23.
• Merriam Webster, Inc. Merriam-Webster Online. www.merriam-webster.com (accessed January 2010).