Some Second Thoughts on English and Capital: A Response to Pennycook (original) (raw)
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English Classroom Journal Vol.25 1 (1)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. The views expressed in the articles are that of the authors.
International Multilingual Research Journal, 2013
As we, an instructor and her students, read through Alastair Pennycook's Critical Applied Linguistics (2001) in a PhD seminar by the same name, we found ourselves contrasting and comparing the insights provided in that book with those in other critical texts and wondering what the ten years since the work's publication had meant. This article is a collection of such reflections, one that is guided by our belief that activities relating to language use, change, and teaching are inherently political and dynamic, and that therefore we must be prepared for the challenges that operating within this paradigm always brings. After a brief introduction to the work itself, we present our thoughts on what critical approaches do-in particular what Critical Applied Linguistics as proposed by Pennycook intends to do-the relationship between the critical and linguistics, the possibility of change through the critical, and the role of questioning and skepticism in forging a different reality.
The politics of Intentionality in Englishes: Provincializing Capitalization
This article theorizes how the privileging of “intentional” deviations from ostensibly mainstream Englishes represents a form of epistemic violence that replicates and sustains the logics of coloniality, presuming the inherent and chronic inferiority of non-mainstream cultural forms, practices, and institutions. In response, this article considers the potentiality of errors in peripheralized Englishes as moments of disinvention through an extended analysis of an artifact that represents an enunciation of political and linguistic decoloniality. Focusing on the orthographic feature of capitalization as a case in point, I enact the practice of provincialization toward exposing the inadequacies of monofunctional orthography for an inherently and increasingly plurilithic language like English. To conclude, I use alternatively capitalized English as a reconstituted and decolonizing expressive mode.
2022
This is a legal note on the history of capitalization in the United States Constitution. A brief review of the history of capital letters is considered together with the influence of eighteenth century British grammars on capitalization practices that would have been familiar to the Founding Fathers. The corpus of the paper is a close comparison of drafts of the Constitutional Convention's Committee of Detail and Committee of Style and their particular deviations in capitalization, with a focus on what this might convey about the Constitution in relation to grammatical understandings at the time of the founding. Additional points of interest include the "Great Semicolon Debate of 1823." A close review of some capitalization provisions in the official, engrossed copy of the Constitution and their implications are also considered. Finally, this paper offers some thoughts on contemporary issues in originalism, with a particular assessment of the role that capitalization could play in understandings of drafters' intent originalism. Program: Juris Doctor, William & Mary Law School
Springer eBooks, 2016
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2020
The present contribution analyses the sentence-internal capitalisation practice in selected Dutch bibles printed between 1450 and 1750. The use of majuscules proves to be highly sensitive to word class, i.e. it almost exclusively affects nouns. The Dutch case exhibits clear parallels to the emergence and development of sentence-internal capitalisation in German: In both languages, the majuscule was first conventionalised in proper names. Within common nouns, the use of uppercase letters is initially driven by pragmatic factors (i.e. emphatic and/or honorific use). By the end of the 16th century, however, the use of majuscules is increasingly motivated by cognitive factors, mainly animacy and concreteness of the referent. Finally, the comparison of Dutch bible prints with their German textual basis shows that Dutch printers did not adapt the capitalisation conventions of the German source-text on a one-to-one basis. Rather, Dutch printers appear to have temporarily established a capitalisation practice of their own with a clear preference to uppercase concrete nouns as opposed to abstract nouns. However, the capitalisation practice is generally characterised by a tremendous inconsistency across the single Dutch bible prints throughout the whole period under consideration. This inconsistency is considered to be one reason for the fact that sentence-internal capitalisation was abandoned in Dutch spelling in the long-run.
Reflections on Critical Applied Linguistics: a conversation with Alastair Pennycook
Signótica, 2016
gave the event's opening lecture entitled "Critical Applied Linguistic Challenges." Widely known for his work on critical approaches to language education and applied linguistics, he generously accepted our request to talk about this issue. In the year that his book Critical applied linguistics: a critical introduction completes 15 years of publication, it is an honor for us to publish our conversation.
2018
Demystifying the Conventions of English Grammar in the Classroom This seminar paper examines the sociopolitical properties surrounding the Eurowestern procedures that are implemented in the discourse in our American school curriculum, our academic institutions, and the career industry. In my paper, a primary text that I will be utilizing to analyze and advance my claims is John McWhorter's Word on The Street: Debunking The Myth of a "Pure" Standard English. It is within this primary text that I will be using to synthesize an analysis by focusing on the following primary elements: prescriptivism, meritocracy, and elitism within the Euro-American education system. As a primary focus, McWhorter states: Dictionary editors and grammarians are always giving in to constructions resisted by their predecessors. No matter what the authority of the written form, or how tenaciously it holds on to the past, or how absurd the gulf between the written and the spoken form becomes, the spoken form always, always keeps on changing-and ultimately drags the written form reluctantly with it (McWhorter 17). With secondary texts that I will be using to support my seminar paper, I will be utilizing Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, JH. Samy Alim's Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race, and John Wesley White's "Deconstructing Meritocracy in the College Classroom," to explicate and elaborate on these said procedures embedded within the