Merriam Webster Spell Jam Registration Key Serial: Tips and Tricks to Master the Game

Already published is an article by Leech, "Recent grammatical change inEnglish: data, description, theory", in K. Aijmer & B. Altenberg(eds.), Advances in CorpusLinguistics (Papers from the 23rd International Conference onEnglish Language Research on Computerized Corpora, Göteborg 22-26May 2002), Amsterdam: Rodopi (2004), 61-81. Still in press isLeech & Smith, "Recent grammatical change in written English,1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American andBritish English", in Antoinette Renouf & Andrew Kehoe (eds.), The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics,Amsterdam: Rodopi. My summary here relies on further discussionby Leech in e-mail to Rodney Huddleston and to me.Though restrictive vs. non-restrictive relatives are not entirelyfactored out, Leech did some recent quick calculations that factoredout prepositional relatives (obviously a potentially importantconsideration, given the decline in fronted prepositions vs. strandedprepositions), and came up with, in the U.S. data, a decrease of 41.5%in the frequency of non-prepositional whichrelatives and a corresponding increase of 48.5% in the frequency ofnon-prepositional thatrelatives. This is pretty stunning, and exceeds the changes inBritish English by roughly a FACTOR of 5.Now, this effect is in the direction of "colloquialization", given thatrestrictive which is lessfrequent in spoken vs. written English. But the effect is, inLeech & Smith's words, "dramatic", way beyond simple Americancolloquialization. Leech & Smith conclude: "This preference[for restrictive that],amounting to an increasing taboo against which as a restrictive relativizer,is now built into grammar checking software, and we can expect it to bemaking even greater headway at present than in the early 1990s."But. But. What we're looking at here is what comes out ofthe publishing enterprise. We don't know what went into it. Here Anne Fadiman's passing reference to copyediting suddenly becomesrelevant:"Letter from the Editor: TheThanksgiving Table", American Scholar,Autumn 2004, p. 9:I also read through many of the folders in my twenty-two linear feet ofSCHOLAR-related files. One of them was labeled"Checking." It contained research material faxed by Jeanie[Stipicevic, managing editor] and Sandra [Costich, associate editor],who not only format our pages and enforce the sacred distinctionbetween which and that but also check our pieces foraccuracy.Oh dear, "the sacred distinction". And it comes up in connectionwith the formatting of pages, a matter of the mechanics ofpublication. As I've noted here before,U.S. publishing establishments (even those that are arms of Britishpublishing establishments) tend to view the That Rule as a mechanicalstipulation, like spellings in -or(rather than -our), rejectionof the serial comma, and placing commas and periods inside (rather thanoutside) closing quotation marks. It in enshrined in house stylesheets, in the very influential ChicagoManual of Style, and in Microsoft Word's grammar checker. I find this bizarre, but there it is.What's important here is not that all these sources of advice subscribeto the That Rule -- after all, real-life writers happily, regularly,and systematically fail to adhere to the proscriptions in the manuals,as should be clear from studies like Leech's -- but that those whomediate between what people write and what gets published subscribe tothe rule. Who knows what people actually write? Whateveryou type in, Microsoft Word or a copyeditor will silently alter it, atleast if you're in the U.S. It's out of your hands.So what do corpus linguists make of the results?zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu

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