The author is dead. 🙂

In literary studies, we say that the biography of the author is irrelevant to the interpretation of a text because the author either managed to say what they meant to say, in which case we should be able to find it in the text itself even if we didn’t know anything about the author, or they didn’t manage to say it, in which case it doesn’t matter. (Umberto Eco said this, I think.)

It’s the same with language. If there’s something in history but the data don’t show it, it’s irrelevant. If there’s something in history and the data show it, too, you don’t need the history.

Granted, in a paper on Latin loanwords in Old English, it does make sense to mention that Britain ceased to be a Roman colony about 100 years before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, and that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain were christianized starting in the sixth century, Latin being the language of the church. But you don’t need an extra section for it, mention it in the introduction if you like. More importantly, see if you can confirm the story with your data: do the Latin words in Old English transport Roman concepts, or are they Christian terms? You can speculate about what the contact situation is likely to have been after your analysis, on the basis of your findings.

Or take language contact with French. (The topic of Norman-French loanwords in English is banned, by the way.) Of course it’s never a bad idea to remind people of the Norman Conquest in 1066 (one sentence!), but rather than begin with “French was the language of the upper class” (How do you know? How does your history book know?), look at the loan words themselves and see what they tell you about who was or wasn’t upper class. This doesn’t belong into a “Historical Background” section, it’s in the foreground, it’s your main research interest, in fact.

Final example: Scandinavian place names and switching code. The whole point of investigating non-cognate sound substitution is to find out whether Old Norse and Old English ought to be considered different languages or not. You cannot present a tree diagram and say “look here, Old Norse is in a different branch from Old English, so they are different languages”. People draw these tree diagrams based on studies of language. They illustrate our best guess, they are not independent information. Your job is to present linguistic evidence and confirm or revise the diagrams.

Term papers are argumentative, not narrative texts. Purely narrative passages will not win you any points. You are writing about the history of English, not of England. So, whenever you’re tempted to preface your paper with a “Historical Background” section, make sure it contains only the information really necessary to understand the rest of the paper, and see if it really needs to be a separate section. You don’t have space to waste.

I’ve repeatedly found myself thinking “this could turn out to be an excellent term paper”, and then, when turning the page, being shocked to see that the next headline was “Conclusion”. Where did the analysis-bit go?

Ideally, the main part of your paper (i.e. the analysis of actual language, including discussion/interpretation), should make up about two thirds of the total words of your paper. So if you’ve finished your introduction and you’ve written 1000 words already, something’s wrong.

The good news is: coming to the point fast is a skill that can be learned. See for yourselves, which passage would you prefer to read?

In order to find out whether phrasal verbs occur in academic English, I queried two corpora, the BNC for British English and the COCA for American English. The queries are different, because the corpora have different tagsets, so the query for the BNC had to be adjusted somewhat in order to be used with the COCA. The queries are:
(1) —
(2) —
The results are that for the first query I found 435 hits and for the second query 522 hits, which shows that phrasal verbs are used in academic texts in British English and American English. There are slightly more hits in COCA than in the BNC, but since the COCA is a lot bigger, this may not be a real difference in use.

version 1

Phrasal verbs do occur in academic texts, both in British and in American English; in the BNC 5% of all verb forms are phrasal and 7% in the COCA.

version 2

Version 1 is wordy and somewhat clumsy; it contains a lot of redundant information (tagsets, corpus sizes, query syntax, absolute frequencies) and redundant linguistic expressions (“the results are that”) and takes forever to come to the point. Version 2, by contrast, gets the preliminaries out of the way in as few words as possible so as to be able to move on to more interesting things fast. The relevant information is there nonetheless. If you present relative frequencies (percentages), the reader knows that (a) you’ve consulted a corpus, that (b) you’ve run different queries, and (c) that you’ve done your math, taking differing corpus sizes into account. FU-specific technicalities should not be in the paper, they are irrelevant to researchers working with other corpora or different software. In a nutshell: Tell us what you’ve done, but not how you managed to do it.

As you gain experience, condensing information will come naturally. Consider the next example:

Due to the length of this term paper, I will not be able to present the findings of my investigation of all phrasal verbs, so only the use of point out and carry out will be compared.

version 1

For reasons of space the analysis will be restricted to point out and carry out.

version 2

For reasons of space X will… is a set phrase in academic literature. No need to lose more words about saving space than this. Once you read more papers in linguistics, you’ll automatically start using these convenient little chunks yourselves. We all know that academic papers have word limits. Restricted to entails that there were more things about the topic that could have been mentioned, so there’s no need to spell this out.

Another frequent thing is “In her paper”. Instead of writing “In her paper, Freund argues that the progressive also has subjective or non-aspectual function […]”, why not just say “Freund argues”? We know that it must have been in a paper, and you’re going to have a citation anyway. Or, if you agree with what is being argued for, just say “The progressive also has non-aspectual functions (Freund YYYY:pp)”.

You can also, of course, save space by leaving things out entirely. Remember to refer to your research question. What does your reader need to know in order to understand your main point? Everything else needs to go, unfortunartely. Typical things that you should consider deleting entirely include:

• pre-introductions
  Try to come to the point fast. The introduction is for explaining what you are going to do in your paper and (maybe) why, but you do not have to explain that linguistics is fascinating, that English is a world language, that languages change all the time or that speakers do not think about language the way linguists do. These things are commonplaces that waste space and test the patience of your (busy) reader without furthering your argumentation. Write the introduction after everything else has been written; then, once you’re done, check whether the first paragraph can perhaps be deleted without anything important being lost. (I know what I’m talking about, being a notorious pre-first-paragraph writer myself, constantly tempted to put things into ever larger contexts.)
• yourself
  Don’t preface your study with “As a prospective teacher, I really need to have a perfect command of English grammar, and that is why…” or something to this effect. Your own struggles as a learner are not at issue, and you should not diminish the general significance of your study by making it appear to be solely a learner’s issue. You and your readership are interested in linguistics. For its own sake. There’s no need for an apologia to get you started.
• definitions
  If you really need to define things, be sure to find a linguistic definition, not a Duden or Brockhaus definition, and if you have a definition you find useful, don’t add more definitions that are less useful (unless you’re writing about the history of scholarship or you wish to discuss the various merits and shortcomings of different perspectives the phenomenon under study). If you’re writing about something that can safely be considered basic knowledge in linguistics (i.e. if it’s something that your fellow students in another seminar or module can be expected to know), you do not need to quote a definition.
• theory
  Some argumentations require a solid theoretical foundation, but you need to know what you need it for. Don’t re-narrate theoretical issues you never end up referring back to in the rest of the paper. You get no points for correct but irrelevant pieces of knowledge, even if they are on the same general topic. If it doesn’t help answer your research question, it’s irrelevant. If you feel that what others have called a “theory” is common sense, you can usually be brief about it.
• historical background
  (See separate post.)

If you’ve left out everything unnecessary and formulated everything else concisely and you still cannot cover your topic in 2000 words, you may need to re-think the topic or save it for your bachelor’s or master’s thesis.