This paper contains TEN (10) questions.
There are THREE SECTIONS (A, B and C) in this question paper
Answer FOUR (4) questions; choose at least ONE (1) from EACH SECTION.
Each question is worth 25 marks. Try to spend roughly the same amount of time for each question - we recommend that this should be 45 minutes.

1. Provide short, encyclopaedic entries to all the terms below. Your entries should attempt to say what the terms mean or refer to, and suggest why they are significant or useful or necessary. Please use complete, grammatical sentences in your entries, each of which should be about 50 words in length.

(a) language planning
(b) paralanguage
(c) the rules of use in relation to the speech context
(d) the Angles, Saxons and Jutes
(e) foregrounding and backgrounding information in a message
(f) accommodation theory
(g) language Purists in sixeenth-century England
(h) Received Pronunciation

2. The following is an extract from Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (London: Black Swan, 1995). Bryson is an American travelling in England, and here he describes the menu in a restaurant. He contrasts two styles, playing around and parodying (exaggerating) them. Try to (a) characterise the two styles in terms of lexis and grammar; (b) show where Bryson moves from one to another; and (c) suggest why these two styles have been employed.
 
 

Given the nature of the hotel I’d expected the menu to feature items like brown windsor soup and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, but of course these things have moved on in the hotel trade. The menu now was richly endowed with ten-guinea words that you wouldn’t have seen on a menu ten years ago – ‘noisettes’, ‘tartare’, ‘duxelle’, ‘coulis’, ‘timbale’ – and written in a curious inflated language with eccentric capitalisations. I had, and I quote, ‘Fanned Falia Melon and Cumbrian Air Dried Ham served with a Mixed leaf Salad’ followed by ‘Fillet Steak served with a crushed Black Peppercorn Sauce flamed in Brandy and finished with Cream’, which together were nearly as pleasurable to read as to eat.       I was greatly taken with this new way of talking and derived considerable pleasure from speaking it to the waiter. I asked him for a lustre of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature1 in a cylinder of glass, and when he came round with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondel2 of blanched wheat oven backed and masked in a poppy-seed coating. I was just getting warmed up to this and about to ask for a fanned lap coverlet, freshly laundered and scented with a delicate hint of Omo, to replace the one that had slipped from my lap and now lay recumbent on the horizontal walking surface anterior to my feet when he handed me a card that said ‘sweets Menu’ and I realised that we were back in the no-nonsense world of English.       It’s a funny this about English diners. They’ll let you dazzle them with piddly duxelles of this and fussy little noisettes of that, but don’t fuck with their puddings, which is my thinking exactly. All the dessert entries were for gooey dishes with good English names. I had sticky toffee pudding and it was splendid. As I finished, the waiter invited me to withdraw to the lounge where a caisson fo fresh-roasted coffee, complemented by the chef’s own selection of mint wafers, awaited. I dressed the tabletop with a small circlet of copper specie3 crafted at the Royal Mint and, suppressing a small eructing of gastro-intestinal air, effected my egress.  1 usually au naturel (French), meaning ‘in its natural state’  2 ‘little circle’ (from French)  3 money in the form of coins as opposed to notes

3. This is an extract from Heng Siok Tian's play The Lift (1991). A man and a woman are waiting for a lift in an HDB void deck which never arrives.

(a) Imagine either the man or the woman got arrested and needed to file a formal police report. Rewrite how one of them might recount what happened in grammatical and formal English.
(b) Playwrights sometimes try to make their plays sound realistic. Do you think Heng's dialogue sounds like a conversation in terms of lexis, grammar and organisation? How is it different from the police report?
 

MAN: I’m tired of all this waiting.  WOMAN: I also.  MAN: Let’s go.  WOMAN: Let’s  MAN: This time it’s for real.  WOMAN: OK, but let’s call the lift service man.  MAN: And tell him what, bodoh?  WOMAN: Hmm . . . and tell him . . . Eh you call me bodoh? You think you very smart.            (MAN keeps quiet to prevent antagonism. Bends down to tie shoelaces.)  WOMAN: What, you think you ignore me, everything is settled. You scolded me, you know.  MAN: Where I got scold you?  WOMAN: You call me bodoh and then pretended nothing wrong by tying your shoelaces.  MAN: Sometimes, you woman are so quarrelsome. I just use the word. I don’t exactly say you are bodoh.  WOMAN: What you mean I quarrelsome. You start first you know.  MAN: Eh be fair, I didn’t scold you.  WOMAN: You some more say don’t have, you just called me bodoh.  MAN: Sound like my mother.  WOMAN: Choy!  MAN: I keep you company all this time, I can go away.  WOMAN: Go lah I no need you, your smoke, everything. But you say sorry first.  MAN: I really did not scold you. I always say like that to my kakis in the company.  WOMAN: I don’t work for you.  MAN: OK OK, I think it is all this waiting.

4. The passage in the box below comes from Bernard Shaw's play Mrs Warren's Profession. It reproduces an exchange between the fashionably clever and superficial Frank Gardner, who is on the lookout for a package of love, money and social position, and his father, the Revd Samuel Gardner, whom Shaw describes as 'clamorously asserting himself as father and clergyman'.

Using the core/periphery distinction which you are familiar with, discuss the ways in which the choices and combinations of words in the passage help Shaw to achieve exactly the effects he appears to be aiming at. Support your discussion with rewritings of brief portions of the passage, which subtitute core words for matching non-core words and vice versa.
 
 

FRANK: . . . Come in.  REVD SAMUEL: No sir;4 not until I know whose garden I am entering.  FRANK: It’s all right. It’s Miss Warren’s.  REVD SAMUEL: I have not seen her at church since she came.  FRANK: Of course not; she’s a third wrangler.5 Ever so intellectual. Took a higher degree than you did; so why should she go to hear you preach?  REVD SAMUEL: Don’t be disrespectful, sir.  FRANK: Oh, it don’t matter: nobody hears us. Come in. I want to introduce you to her. Do you remember the advice you gave to me last July, gov’nor?6  REVD SAMUEL: [severely] Yes, I advised you to conquer your idleness and flippancy, and to work your way into an honourable profession and live on it and not upon me.  FRANK: No; that’s what you thought of afterwards. What you actually said was that since I had neither brains nor money, I’d better turn my good looks to account by marrying somebody with both. Well, look here. Miss Warren has brains: you can’t deny that.  REVD SAMUEL: Brains are not everything.  FRANK: No, of course not: here’s the money –  REVD SAMUEL: [interrupting him austerely] I was not thinking of money, sir. I was speaking of higher things. Social position, for instance.  FRANK: I don’t care a rap about that.  REVD SAMUEL: But I do, sir.  FRANK: Well, nobody wants you to marry her.  4 The Revd Samuel’s use of ‘sir’ to address his son represents a deliberate effort by him to distance himself sternly from him.  5 The term ‘third wrangler’ is a term unique to Cambridge University which refers to the person who got the third highest mark in the final honours examination leading to a degree in mathematics.  6 The term gov’nor is a shortened form of the term ‘governor’, which was used in a slangy, colloquial way by young men in Britain at that time to refer to their father.

 

5. The boxed passage below is taken from Randolph Quirk's paper, 'The English Language in the Global Context', where he makes a case for the maintenance of standards in English.

The passage represents academic writing, but included among the devices which mark it out to be a piece of academic writing are certian features characteristic of interpersonal conversation exchange (for example, the use of 'I').

(a) Rewrite the passage in a colloquail, everyday form which you might use when arguing in support of Quirk's position among a group of friends in the canteen or some such place.

(b) Comparing your rewritten version with the original, show how academic writing typically works. Pay particular attention to the ways in which the academic devices it uses help project the writer's viewpoint as 'neutral' and 'objective', an 'expert' view which represents the true situation as it really is.

(c) Given what you have said under (b), what role do you see the more interpersonal conversational devices in the passage playing?
 

I believe that the fashion of undermining belief in standard English has wrought educational damage in the ENL countries,7 though I am ready to concede that there may well have been compensating educational gains in the wider tolerance for an enjoyment of the extraordinary variety of English around us in any of these countries. But then just such an airy contempt for standards started to be exported to EFL8 and ESL9 countries, and for this I can find no such mitigating compensation. The relatively narrow range of purposes for which the non-native needs to use English (even in ESL countries) is arguably well catered for by a single monochrome standard form that looks as good on paper as it sound sin speech. There are only the most dubious advantages in exposing the learner to a great variety of usage, no part of which he will have time to master properly, little of which he will be called upon to exercise, all of which is embedded in a controversial sociolinguistic matrix which he cannot be expected to understand.  7 ENL stands for ‘English as a Native Language’ and ENL countries are Britain, the USA and so on.  8 EFL stands for ‘English as a Foreign Language’, and EFL countries are countries like Germany which use English for ‘external’ purposes.  9 ESL stands for ‘English as a Second Language’, and ESL countries are countries like Singapore and India, which use the language ‘non-natively’ for ‘external’ and some ‘internal’ purposes.

NOTE: Quirk's paper responds to claims made by linguists on behalf of the varieties of English that have arisen across the world as a result of the global spread of the language. Some might argue that he is 'putting down' these other varieites by upholding a single standard which will come out looking very much like 'ENL'. This allows him to make Standard British or American English the norm by which all other varieties of English are judged; implicitly, all of these other varieties will them emerge as lesser forms of the language than such standard varieties. They will also probably say that his claims in the last few sentences are not accurate.

SECTION C (ESSAYS: 25 marks)
Answer at least ONE (1) question from this section.

6. ‘In countries where two or more languages coexist, confusion often arises’ (Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue). Discuss how English speakers in the past coped with either Scandinavian (8th century onwards) or French (11th century onwards).

7. ‘Rich kids [in Singapore] are not snobbish, and Singlish is spoken for fun . . . A public school accent [= RP, or posh British accent] is okay, but an MTV accent is not so cool’ (Wong Sing Yeong, 8 Days)

‘I should hope that when I am speaking abroad, my countrymen will have no trouble recognising that I’m from Singapore’ (Tommy Koh).

Discuss the above quotations. You will need to say what you mean by accents and why they might be markers of group or national identity. Provide copious examples in your answer.

8. With reference to the socio-historical conditions under which standard English emerged, discuss the view that it is a class dialect, one major social function of which is to secure the position of the class who use it.

9. ‘On both linguistic and social grounds, New Varieties of English (eg Singapore English) are just like other varieties of the language, neither worse nor better.’ Discuss.

10. Critically examine the role of English in the world, looking at both the benefits it brings ex-colonial nations and the problems it might cause for them.