Dennis Baron | |
---|---|
Born | May 9, 1944 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Professor |
Academic background | |
Education | Brandeis University (B.A.) Columbia University (M.A.) University of Michigan (PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | English and linguistics |
Institutions | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
Website | english |
Dennis Baron (born May 9,1944) is a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [1] [2] His research focuses on the technologies of communication;language legislation and linguistic rights;language reform;gender issues in language;language standards and minority languages and dialects;English usage;and the history and present state of the English language. [3]
Baron received a B.A. from Brandeis University in 1965;an M.A. from Columbia University in 1968;and a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Michigan in 1971. [4] [5] He taught high school English in New York City and in Wayland,Massachusetts. Before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois in 1975,he taught at Eastern Illinois University and at the City College of CUNY. Baron is of both South Asian and Romanian-Jewish descent. [6] [7]
Baron has held a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He twice chaired the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Public Language,which gives out the annual Doublespeak and George Orwell Awards; [8] he edited the monograph series Publications of the American Dialect Society, [5] and he has served on professional committees of the Modern Language Association and the Linguistic Society of America.
Baron's most recent work,A Better Pencil:Readers,Writers,and the Digital Revolution,describes people's relationship with computers and the internet describing how the digital revolution influences reading and writing practices,and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. Baron explores the use of computers as writing tools. Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils,crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards,were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers,not words,until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched:email,the instant message,the web page,the blog,social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook,and communally generated texts like Urban Dictionary,and YouTube. [9]
In The English-Only Question:An Official Language for Americans?,Baron writes about the philosophical,legal,political,educational,and sociological implications of the English-only movement,tracing the history of American attitudes toward English and minority languages during the past two centuries,and how battles to save English or minority languages have been fought in the press,the schools,the courts,and the legislatures of the country. [10]
In his Guide to Home Language Repair Baron answers the questions that he is most frequently asked about English grammar. [11]
Declining Grammar and Other Essays on the English Vocabulary contains essays about English words,and how they are defined,valued,and discussed. "Language Lore," examines some of the myths and misconceptions that affect attitudes toward language—and towards English in particular. "Language Usage," examines some specific questions of meaning and usage. "Language Trends," examines some controversial trends in English vocabulary,and some developments too new to have received comment before. "Language Politics," treats several aspects of linguistic politics,from special attempts to deal with the ethnic,religious,or sex-specific elements of vocabulary to the broader issues of language both as a reflection of the public consciousness and the U.S. Constitution and as a refuge for the most private forms of expression. [12]
Grammar and Gender traces the history of the sexual biases that exist in the English language and describes past and present efforts to correct these biases by reforming usage and vocabulary. [13]
In Grammar and Good Taste:Reforming the American Language,Baron writes about the history of American language,the development of the concept of Federal English in post-Revolutionary America,the movements for spelling reform,for the creation of a language academy on the model of the French Academy,and the role of the common schools in directing the course of English through grammar instruction. [14]
Baron blogs regularly about communication technology and about language issues on the Web of Language and has written articles on language issues for The New York Times ; [15] The Washington Post;the Los Angeles Times ; [16] the Chicago Tribune ;and other newspapers,on topics such as official English,American resistance to studying foreign languages,and grammar. He has been a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education [17] and has written for Inside Higher Ed . Baron has also been quoted as an expert in many articles about language. [18] [19] [20] [21]
Baron has been interviewed on CNN, [22] NPR,the CBC,the BBC, [23] the Voice of America,and other radio and television stations discussing topics ranging from the impact of computers on language,to gender-neutral language,to official English,to slang and profanity. [4]
Baron has been a legal expert witness,interpreting the language of contracts and advertising materials and offering opinions on the readability of documents. Baron was lead author,together with colleagues Richard W. Bailey and Jeffrey Kaplan,of "the Linguists' Brief," an amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller before the U.S. Supreme Court,providing an interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the "right to bear arms" amendment) based on the grammars,dictionaries,and general usage common in the founders' day,and showing that those meanings are still common today. [24] [25] The brief was mentioned positively in the dissenting opinion of Justice Stevens, [26] and negatively in Justice Scalia's majority opinion deciding the case. [24] [27]
Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
The University of Illinois System is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Illinois consisting of three universities: University of Illinois Chicago, University of Illinois Springfield, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Across its three universities, the University of Illinois System enrolls more than 94,000 students. It had an operating budget of $7.18 billion in 2021.
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.
The Spivak pronouns are a set of gender-neutral pronouns in English promulgated on the virtual community LambdaMOO based on pronouns used in a book by American mathematician Michael Spivak. Though not in widespread use, they have been employed in writing for gender-neutral language by those who wish to avoid the standard terms he, she, or singular they.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. It is the flagship institution of the University of Illinois system and was established in 1867. With over 53,000 students, the University of Illinois is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the United States.
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.
Donald Bruce Gillies was a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer programming environments.
Composition studies is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States.
George Tobias Flom was an American professor of linguistics and author of numerous reference books.
Paul Trevier Bateman was an American number theorist, known for formulating the Bateman–Horn conjecture on the density of prime number values generated by systems of polynomials and the New Mersenne conjecture relating the occurrences of Mersenne primes and Wagstaff primes.
Ladies and gentlemen is a salutation and irreversible binomial used in the field of entertainment, sports and theater since the 19th century. The salutation is unlike most English language gendered irreversible binomials which typically place the male term before the female term. Before the 19th century, the terms "gentil men and ladies" and "gentlemen and ladies" were more common, and according to prevalence in 18th century newspapers and usage in the Oxford English Dictionary, the shift in popularity to the form "ladies and gentlemen" occurred during the late 18th century.
This list comprises widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be misconceptions.
Henry Roy Brahana was a mathematician, specializing in metabelian groups and related geometric structures.
The official language of Illinois is English. Nearly 80% of the population speak English natively, and most others speak it fluently as a second language. The forms of American English spoken in Illinois range from Inland Northern near Chicago and the northern part of the state, to Midland and Southern dialects further downstate. Illinois has speakers of many other languages, of which Spanish is by far the most widespread. Illinois's indigenous languages disappeared when the Indian population was deported under the policy of Indian Removal.
Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Switzerland and Australia.
Jenny L. Davis is an American linguist, anthropologist, and poet. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, American Indian Studies, and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program. Her research is on contemporary Indigenous languages and identity, focusing on Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous gender and sexuality, especially within the Two-Spirit movement.
Kristin L. Hoganson is an American historian specializing in the history of the United States. She teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Raymond J. Mooney is an American computer scientist, professor of computer science, and director of the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on machine learning and natural language processing.