Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T10:39:34.819Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - An Ontological Framework for English

from Part I - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2019

Christopher J. Hall
Affiliation:
York St John University
Rachel Wicaksono
Affiliation:
York St John University
Get access

Summary

What is there in the world that we refer to as ‘the English language’? Is it more than one thing? If so, how many? And what is their ontological status? For those of us engaged in researching and teaching what we call English, these are fundamental questions, yet they are seldom posed. In addressing them explicitly here, I aim to provide academics, teachers, and policy makers with some conceptual tools and arguments for a deeper reflection on the nature of English, with a view to ultimately benefiting learners and users.

Type
Chapter
Information
Ontologies of English
Conceptualising the Language for Learning, Teaching, and Assessment
, pp. 13 - 36
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Armstrong, N. and Mackenzie, I. E. (2013). Standardization, Ideology and Linguistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barbour, S. (2000). Britain and Ireland: The varying significance of language for nationalism. In Barbour, S. and Carmichael, C., eds., Language and Nationalism in Europe (pp. 1843). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barlow, M. (2013). Individual differences and usage-based grammar. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(4), 443478.Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., and Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Canagarajah, S. (2007). Lingua franca English, multilingual communities, and language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 91, 923939.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Crowley, T. (1991). Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Davis, D. R. (2006). World Englishes and descriptive grammars. In Kachru, B. B., Kachru, Y., and Nelson, C. L., eds., The Handbook of World Englishes (pp. 509525). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Department for Education (2011). Teachers’ standards: Guidance for school leaders, school staff and governing bodies. Online. Retrieved 27 July 2017 from www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-standardsGoogle Scholar
Fortier, A. M. (2017). On (not) speaking English: Colonial legacies in language requirements for British citizenship. Sociology. doi: 10.1177/0038038517742854Google Scholar
Haegeman, L. and Guéron, J. (1999). English Grammar: A Generative Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hall, C. J. (2013). Cognitive contributions to plurilithic views of English and other languages. Applied Linguistics, 34, 211231.Google Scholar
Hall, C. J. (2014). Moving beyond accuracy: From tests of English to tests of ‘Englishing’. ELT Journal, 68(4), 376385.Google Scholar
Hall, C. J. (2018). Cognitive perspectives on English as a Lingua Franca. In Jenkins, J., Baker, W., and Dewey, M., eds. Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (pp. 7484). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hall, C. J., Joyce, J., and Robson, C. (2017). Investigating the lexico-grammatical resources of a non-native user of English: The case of can and could in email requests. Applied Linguistics Review, 8(1), 3559.Google Scholar
Hall, C. J., Wicaksono, R., Liu, S., Qian, Y., and Xu, X. (2017). Exploring teachers’ ontologies of English: Monolithic conceptions of grammar in a group of Chinese teachers. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 87109.Google Scholar
Hall, R. A. Jr (1985). Meaning and the idiolect: The idioseme. In Jankowsky, K. R., ed., Scientific and Humanistic Dimensions of Language: Festschrift for Robert Lado. On the Occasion of His 70th Birthday (pp. 353359). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). Systemic background. In Benson, J. D., ed., Systemic Perspectives on Discourse: 1. Selected Theoretical Papers from the 9th International Systemic Workshop (pp. 115). New York: Ablex.Google Scholar
Harris, R. (1981). The Language MythLondon: Duckworth.Google Scholar
Haugen, I. (1966). Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist, 68, 922935.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. (1992). Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Janicki, K. (2006). Language Misconceived: Arguing for Applied Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Jenkins, R. (2004). Social Identity, 3rd ed. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnstone, B. (2002). Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jørgensen, J. N. (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism, 5(3), 161176.Google Scholar
Joseph, J. E. (2002). Is language a verb? Conceptual change in linguistics and language teaching. In Trappes-Lomax, H. R. and Ferguson, G., eds., Language in Language Teacher Education (pp. 2947). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Joseph, J. E. (2004). Language and Identity. National, Ethnic, Religious. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kohn, K. (2011). English as a lingua franca and the Standard English misunderstanding. In de Hower, A. and Wilton, A., eds., English in Europe Today: Sociocultural and Educational Perspectives (pp. 7194). Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Lado, R. (1979). Thinking and “languaging”: A psycholinguistic model of performance and learning. Sophia Linguistica, 12, 324.Google Scholar
Lemhöfer, K., Schriefers, H., and Indefrey, P. (2014). Idiosyncratic grammars: Syntactic processing in second language comprehension uses subjective feature representations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(7), 14281444.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Le Page, R. B. and Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity. Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A., eds. (2007). Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Mauranen, A. (2012). Exploring ELF. Academic English Shaped by Non-native Speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardizationJournal of Sociolinguistics5(4), 530555.Google Scholar
Mollin, S. (2009). “I entirely understand” is a Blairism: The methodology of identifying idiolectal collocations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 14(3), 367392.Google Scholar
Mortensen, J. (2013). Notes on English used as a lingua franca as an object of study. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 2(1), 2546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Padilla, A. M., Lindholm, K. J., Chen, A. et al. (1991). The English-only movement: Myths, reality, and implications for psychologyAmerican Psychologist46(2), 120130.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A. (2007). The myth of English as an international language. In Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A., eds., Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp. 90115). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a Local Practice. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Santana, C. (2016). What is language? Ergo, 3(19), 501523.Google Scholar
Saussure, F. de. (1916/1966). Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (2010). Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Seidlhofer, B. (2001). Closing a conceptual gap: The case for a description of English as a lingua franca. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 133158.Google Scholar
Seidlhofer, B. (2011). Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sharpe, R. A. (1974). Ideology and ontology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 4, 5564.Google Scholar
Swain, M. (2006). Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language learning. In Byrnes, H., ed., Advanced Language Learning: The Contributions of Halliday and Vygotsky (pp. 95108). London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Swan, M. (2017). EFL, ELF, and the question of accuracy. ELT Journal. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccx031Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language. A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
UKLA and Owen Education (2016). Curriculum and Assessment in English 3 to 19: A Better Plan. Leicester: UKLA Publications. Online. www.nate.org.uk/file/2016/04/The-National-Curriculum-for-English-from-2015.pdfGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M. T. (2014). The declarative/procedural model: A neurobiologically motivated theory of first and second language. In VanPatten, B. and Williams, J., eds., Theories in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (pp. 135158). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wright, S. (2015). What is language? A response to Philippe van ParijsCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy18(2), 113130.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×