Survey
If you are
- a native speaker of American English
- interested in sharing your opinions about language use for an academic (non profit) study;
Please consider filling out this survey. It will take about ten minutes. All personal identifying information will be deleted when the study is completed, and your email will never be shared with anyone.
This survey will run until the end of September. Eligible participants will be entered into a random drawing, and that person will receive a bonus of $150 in thanks for help and participation.
To be eligible for the bonus, you must be able to provide a mailing address in the United States.
The survey is here. You can have a look before you decide whether or not you’d like to participate. There will be more surveys (and drawings) coming up, for people with difference language backgrounds.
EDITED TO ADD: in response to comments, some parts of the survey have been edited for clarity.
On the nature of the questions asked
You may have noticed that in one section of the survey people are asked to decide if a given utterance is ‘proper’ English. This is, of course, a leading question as only four choices are available. One of the respondents noted:
your NEg and POSitive choices are too categorical. where you have choices in 2 and 4 i would argue not only that the choices are inappropriate, but in addition that if *i* were on the IRB you couldn’t limit the choices like that, because a) it doesn’t allow the speaker to say — different but not wrong. in fact, all my own ‘questionables’ in 2 are actually ‘dialect specific’, not northern cities…but there was no nonjudgmental way of coding that allowed. that is a highly questionable tactic. BECAUSE b) it gives some kind of force to those who will claim that they’ve taken an academic survey which assumes ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ and which doesn’t even allow for anyone to NOT be judgmental. [...]
And in fact, there’s not much I could disagree with here. Of course it is true that a person might respond to a a question like these with the answer: it’s not the way I’d say it, but I don’t consider it wrong. A good proportion of people who would like to have that option are likely to be linguists, who have been trained specifically not to make the kind of judgements I’m asking for.
So let me clarify a few points that might help those who are put off by this section of the survey.
This is a preliminary survey, in which I’m experimenting with reactions and attitudes. The section in question — attitudes toward the ‘correctness’ of specific sentences — is not one I would try to quantify for analysis. As flawed as it may seem (to other linguists, at least) it provides me with some useful information as I develop surveys to be posted down the line.
To other linguists who have questions about my methodology, please get in touch by email, because I’d be thankful to hear your thoughts.