Today, just in time for the beginning of the new semester, I updated the Grammar Badgers website with student projects from the fall, including a survey-based one, created by Katalina, Carly, Maggie, Haru, and Naamon.
Over the course of the semester, our team created and conducted a survey about grammar usage, specifically from university students. We were interested in how certain constructions and uses of language are deemed “correct” or “incorrect”. Are people subconsciously controlled by how they were taught what the “right” ways were in prior education, or do they not have a preference as a result of language evolution? Inspired by the Mittins et al. (1970) language usage polls and the “Bridging the Unbridgeable” revisitation of these surveys, we gathered survey responses from mostly (not all) UW-Madison community members regarding their perception of what language is considered appropriate and in which registers (e.g. writing versus speech). This project aimed to investigate whether there are relationships between certain aspects of participants’ backgrounds and their perceptions of grammatical standards. More specifically, we wanted to understand if the dimensions of age and time spent on social media (self-assessed at the level of hours per week) affect participants’ perceptions of the usage of grammatical constructions in different registers.
Here’s what they found (based on 73 completed surveys):