Relative pronouns - that and who

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In a failed attempt to be clever, JTT wrote:

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Yup, why start now, eh, Frank?

All the rest was nothing but red herrings.

This is the egregious part, Frank. You've likely pulled this crap on others and without any apparent knowledge of the subject.

You really are a punk.

You stuck your nose into something you had no reason to be in...and it has come down to this.

What a miserable punk! No wonder you don't have the guts to post a name...or a bio.

If you want to think that English has no “good” or “poor” grammar,JTT...keep on thinking it. If you want to think that not a single language scholar on the planet also thinks there are no "good" or "poor" grammatical constructs...keep on thinking it.

It is obvious to anyone with a brain that many, many learned individuals...language scholars who have written books that fill library bookshelves with advice for how to speak and write with grammatical precision...think otherwise.

I am comfortable in that knowledge.

I am also comforted by knowing that the silliness—indeed stupidity—of the assertion that not a single language scholar on the planet thinks there is good or poor English grammar—is sustainable only by the intellectually cowardly expedient of labeling all the names I brought to the argument as non-language scholars.

Like you and Pinker are the only worthy scholars around.

You just never allowed a peaceful disengagement, punk...because you are a punk; a joke.

Hey...doesn't make you a bad person, JTT...just a punk.

I'll be here whether you like it or not...whether you understand why I am here or not.

I'll actually enjoy watching you act the part of the punk.

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@Miklos7,

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Miklos wrote: You might consider the fact that the study of grammar has little hard science behind it.

Sadly. this was the case for hundreds of years, Miklos. It spawned all the prescriptions that ignorant people still spout daily.

That has changed in the last number of years. As Professor Bailey noted,

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The development of the information age and of English as a world language means that such lapses have even greater negative import than formerly. But what is available on the shelves has fallen into sufficient discredit for grammar to have forfeited its place in the curriculum, unrespected and little heeded by the brighter students.

It was found that ESLs who followed prescriptive grammar produced language that wasn't English. How could that be; that by following rules that supposedly described English, learners would produce unnatural English?

Well, it hardly took much time at all to find out that prescriptive grammar was nothing but a fraud.

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Ideology, Power, and Linguistic Theory

Geoffrey K. Pullum

University of California, Santa Cruz

...

Grammar and style Grammar —

the principles constituting the syntactically and morphologically permissible expressions of a language — is not at all the same thing as style. Style involves skill. It involves making choicesbetween alternatives that the grammar makes available. Those choices can make the difference betweenusing the language brilliantly or using it ploddingly. This is the sort of domain in which the notion of regulative rules makes sense. Indeed, what are known as ‘house style’ guides issued by publishers of books, journals, and newspapers may lay down rules that are in effect mandatory (there can be job-related consequences if the rules are not followed).

But other sources (language teachers; writing tutors; books on how to write) offer discretionary advice. When a style guide or writing tutor tells you that adjuncts are not placed between to and the head verb of an infinitival clause, the claim is not that this never happens in Standard English prose. Far from it: the matter would not be worth mentioning unless people often placed adjuncts in that position! Rather, the claim is that you are doing wrong if you position adjuncts thus: you are doing something that you shouldn’t.

This is what is meant by a prescriptive rule. Construed as having descriptive intent, prescriptive rules seem hopelessly silly, easily refuted hypotheses about the correctness conditions. They seem lessworthy of being taken seriously than the absurdly obvious warnings printed on the packaging of nearly every kind of tool or other consumer durable you can buy in America.

I swear I purchased a folding windshield-sized cardboard screen for protecting the inside of my car from getting overheated in the hot California summer sun, and on the back were the words “Do not drive with screen in place.”But at least that is advice that everyone seems to follow (I certainly do), and a good thing too.

Prescriptive rules seem even dopier than that, because they warn against doing things which (a) everybody does all the time, and (b) are not harmful or inadvisable anyway. But of course prescriptive rules are not intended to be constitutive. They are intended to be regulative.English is assumed to be already defined in some other way, or not to need any definition. The prescriptivist’s rules are deliberately making recommendations about the ways in which you are recommended to use it or not to use it.

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:1hPgf7kYd9QJ:people.ucsc.edu/~pullum/MLA2004.pdf+Ideology,+power+and+linguistic+theory&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1

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@JTT,

My guess is that for a person to develop his/her natural voice, and thereby become an effective speaker and writer, he must use a language until it is engaged by the syntactic areas of his brain. If one obeys a great deal of prescriptive grammar, he is going to be slowed in learning to think and express himself gracefully in a language. Are we in agreement that deeper grammar (as opposed to prescriptive) is closely connected to syntax--and, therefore, much more accommodating of imaginative arrangement?

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@Miklos7,

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My guess is that for a person to develop his/her natural voice, and thereby become an effective speaker and writer, he must use a language until it is engaged by the syntactic areas of his brain.

Everyone becomes an effective speaker, in the sense that they can communicate in language, Miklos. Becoming a gifted speaker is another thing.

Writing is a whole nother thing. It's an artificial part of language and it must be taught and learned, often with great difficulty. Compare that to speaking; every fool learns their language.

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If one obeys a great deal of prescriptive grammar, he is going to be slowed in learning to think and express himself gracefully in a language. Are we in agreement that deeper grammar (as opposed to prescriptive) is closely connected to syntax--and, therefore, much more accommodating of imaginative arrangement?

No one obeys prescriptive grammar rules when they engage in natural language use, Miklos. It has been pointed out in this thread a number of times, the last in my last post where I quoted Prof Pullum, that prescriptive rules are alien to the natural workings of language.

The only reason they ever come up is that they are broken so frequently by people using language.

The long and the short of it, we are in agreement. "Deeper grammar" is a pretty fair description of what goes on when we use language and it is exceedingly complex.

Prescriptive grammar is not complex, it is exceedingly simplistic. As Prof Pullum noted, prescriptive rules are "hopelessly silly, easily refuted".

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@JTT,

Agree with you that few people in ordinary, natural conversation use prescriptive grammar. Sounds weird and stilted. Have you the hunch, as I do, that gifted speakers (either in formal speeches or casual discourse) have been exposed to lots of story-telling, both oral and written? For me, what makes a gifted speaker is 1) presence, 2) contagious narrative momentum, and 3) that unspoken message of "You. Yes, you. Come over here. I've got something interesting to tell you."
I have known a few natural writers. It's really quite counter-intuitive. Two of the five were not even moderately active readers. How this works, I dunno.
Deeper grammar is still largely mysterious. I was chatting with my physician this morning. She has a six-year-old and was curious about how to tell when he would enjoy learning to read. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned that her child loves to play with unusual (but workable) syntax. I take this as a good sign of imagination and, perhaps, readiness to read. But does he WANT to read. We agreed that it would be very cruel to insist a child learn to read at a arbitrary age, as we have no idea whether he is sufficiently well-equipped with the potential for putting his deeper grammar circuitry in play. The child who WANTS to read probably is fully ready.

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@Miklos7,

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Agree with you that few people in ordinary, natural conversation use prescriptive grammar. Sounds weird and stilted

Most people never use prescriptive grammar at any time, Miklos. It is unnatural whenever we use language. It comes into play when teachers/pedants try to pass on these artificial rules to budding writers.

There actually is no use whatsoever for prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar tells us exactly how language works in all situations, in all registers. We can write formally following the rules of descriptive language because, again, descriptive grammar describes the full gamut of language.

There is a place for such thing as prescriptive punctuation, for certain purposes, academic writing, for example, but even here the variance is so great, it illustrates that much of this is opinion.

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Relative pronouns - that and who

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