John
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 11
Language
English
Description
In a sentence such as "Tell each student to hand in their paper," no ambiguity arises, but prescriptivists insist that the singular form of the pronoun be used: his, her, or his or her. Ponder that pronouns' behavior is unpredictable and ever-changing in all languages.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 17
Language
English
Description
Explore features of the language that are off the beaten track of conventional grammar. For example, handbooks often decry the use of the passive voice, but it can be a powerful tool - as in passive expressions using got, which acts as a marker of misfortune.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 7
Language
English
Description
Trace the events that explain why Old English lost much of its complexity in the transition to Middle English. The agents of change were not the Norman French, who arrived in 1066, but the already established Vikings, who's Old Norse fused with Old English to create an abbreviated new language.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 24
Language
English
Description
Drawing on what you have learned about the history of English, look ahead to its possible future course. Some things will stay the same; others will change radically. Close by analyzing a famous 20th-century sentence to chart the curious pathways to our modern tongue.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 2
Language
English
Description
Trace the evidence that English derives from a language that was incompletely learned by invaders of northern Europe more than 2,000 years ago. Where were these people from? An analysis of sound changes in their language, Proto-Germanic, leads to an intriguing hypothesis.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 22
Language
English
Description
Until recently, poetry had a central role in American culture. Why has this distinctive form of elevated language declined, and how has poetry itself changed? Chart this transformation in poets from Longfellow and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Billy Collins and Kurt Cobain.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 12
Language
English
Description
Turn back the clock to a time when proper forms of speech seem ungrammatical now, and what were considered blatant errors sound perfectly correct today. Among the authors you examine are the American colonial poet Anne Bradstreet and Charles Dickens.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 3
Language
English
Description
How did Old English develop from Proto-Germanic? And why did people in Britain end up speaking the language of the Germanic invaders? Discover that the traditional explanation that English was brought to England by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in the 5th century A.D. is vastly oversimplified.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 23
Language
English
Description
Do the shortcuts and informality of e-mail and text messages represent bad writing? Probe this controversy in light of the unique niche filled by these new forms of expression. Until the advent of e-mail and texting, there was no truly conversational form of writing analogous to conversational speech.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 15
Language
English
Description
Investigate the illogicality of English by looking at everything from the use of the definite article, the, which is difficult to teach to nonnative speakers, to the blatantly ungrammatical "aren't I," which is the contraction for "are not I" and is preferred over the more logical "ain't I."
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 14
Language
English
Description
Consider the role of logic in language and why double negatives are the default in French, Russian, and many other languages, including every dialect of English except the standard form. Dangling participles pose a similar problem of seeming illogical while being rarely misunderstood.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 18
Language
English
Description
Focus on fascinating discoveries about grammar in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, an authoritative guide to usage written by linguists. Learn that English doesn't have a future tense, and analyze the peculiar function of up in such expressions as "clean up."
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 9
Language
English
Description
Having seen that Proto-Germanic was streamlined into Old English, which was streamlined into Modern English, discover that Black English takes this process a step further. What some regard as bad grammar is language evolution, analogous to the shift from biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 5
Language
English
Description
Explore the general properties of human language to learn the place of English in the broad spectrum of different tongues. In the process, discover how to distinguish a language spoken by a limited number of people from one used by hundreds of millions around the globe.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 8
Language
English
Description
Starting with Celtic contributions to English vocabulary, explore the borrowings from Old Norse, French, and Latin. These have enriched English with a wealth of synonyms, allowing speakers to choose between alternatives such as the Anglo-Saxon hide versus the Latinate conceal.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 21
Language
English
Description
See how writing styles have changed by comparing typical school reading assignments in the United States from the beginning and end of the 20th century. Then search out the reasons for this marked shift. One clue is that Americans in the past often spoke of a fine style as "good English."
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 10
Language
English
Description
Begin a new section of the course that focuses on your own relationship with language. In this lecture, trace the origin of "correct" usage to Robert Lowth, an 18th-century bishop who wrote an influential textbook on grammar that is the leading source of prescriptivist rules still promoted today.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 13
Language
English
Description
Roll up your sleeves for some language archaeology, tracing the origin of seemingly nonsensical features in English that once had a function. An example: the initial N in the nicknames Ned and Nan is the fossil of mine, the archaic form of my, as in "mine Ed."
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 6
Language
English
Description
Starting with a simple sentence in German, peel away layers of complexity that don't exist in English. Then uncover more evidence that English is unusual in the simplicity of many of its grammatical features, showing that something happened to pare it down.
Author
Series
Great Courses volume 4
Language
English
Description
English has a more interesting history after the Anglo-Saxon period than was previously thought. See how the evidence is in grammatical constructions you use every day. For example, the reason you say "I'm building a house" rather than "I build house" traces to Celtic influences.