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Welcome! The purpose of this blog is to investigate interdisciplinary perspectives on issues of communicating across difference as they relate to the teaching of language and composition. If this is your first time visiting the Annotation Station, you can orient yourself more quickly by knowing I view issues of language, identity, and literacy as ideological issues (rather than neutral), multiple (rather than singular) and fluid and dynamic (rather than fixed and static). I am therefore very interested in translingual, transmodal, transcultural, and transnational communication practices with a critical eye to how power discrepancies shape these issues. Feel free to use this blog as a resource if it meets with your own research and teaching interests, and definitely use the comments feature to suggest any connections and insights of your own.

Monday, August 1, 2016

"English has a New Preposition, Because Internet" - Megan Garber


Garber, Megan. "English has a New Preposition, Because Internet." The Atlantic. 19 Nov 2013. Web. 1 Aug 2016.

This article shows an example of a grammatical process as flexible and sensitive to context, medium, and exigence (my vocabulary, not the author's, since Garber has translated linguistic researchers for a popular audience).  She shows how the word 'because' as a subordinating conjunction usually takes a clause or verb phrase as its object, but it has been increasingly used with a noun phrase object, possibly related to its connection with use in memes, but definitely as a "by the internet, for the internet" type of language development.  She further points out that it is a way to "[make] grand and yet ironized claims, announcing a situation and commenting on that situation at the same time."  I have personally heard this usage from a friend when a movie plot doesn't make sense.  She'll be explaining the plot and then say something along the lines of the following: "Because... reasons!" 
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