Prescriptivism - peddling myths about language

Quote:

Not according to my definition of "like."

That's the best you can do, Joe?

As YOU see it, Joe. It is not my strange definition. It is a definition supported by language science.

If you'd like to read more about it, there's a good discussion in The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.

Descriptivists describe it as I described it to Joe. It's ungrammatical for standard English.

But it is accepted, Robert. It has its place in the nonstandard English, as I believe I also mentioned to Joe, and it's similar in nature to "Confucius say".

Please don't try and delineate what this thread is about.

Prescriptivism is based on deceit. Such is not the case for descriptivism.

The part I've underlined is not true. It's not standard English but it's clear that it is English, just of a nonstandard variety. ain't isn't standard English but it isn't rejected by descriptivists. It's just accurately described as to how it fits our language.

For some dialects, ain't is standard.

On these two particular issues, it's not just a question of drawing a line regarding prevalency. The analysis was simply dead wrong. In the case of 'can' prescriptivists held to the false notion that 'can' only meant ability. In the case of 'that/which', there isn't a time in the language that that was followed. Again prescriptivists simply misanalysed the language.

This is all too common a thread in prescriptivism. Why would anyone want to put their trust in such failures? Language is more than capable of handling itself. If 'me want cookie' becomes the norm, it'll become the norm despite what anyone says.

JTT wrote:

As YOU see it, Joe. It is not my strange definition. It is a definition supported by language science.

........... And if that's how language science sees it, then I'm surprised that nobody else has noticed that obvious bootstrapping argument before.

Yes, I've read it but was apparently less struck with it than you. You quote Pinker sometimes the way some born-again Christians quote the Gospels.

See? Both camps decry this bit of grammar, but for different reasons.

First, I didn't "decry" the form are in the quoted example from a letter published in the Philadelphia Inquirer). (Decrying is strong disapproval, open condemnation with intent to discredit; check your Webster.) It needs no strong public condemnation; it doesn't offend me. I merely said it was wrongly inflected. And I explained in painstaking detail why it couldn't satisfy the normal principles of English. Now, what are these things I'm calling the normal principles? Where do they come from?
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.html

JTT, you are moving the goalposts now. Sure, both camps "accept" abusage as "nonstandard", "colloquial" etc. There is a greater deal of acceptance of these things with descriptivism but this simply wasn't what we are talking about. The point I had been making is that both camps disagree with that bit of grammar, not whether they find it within themselves to accept nonstandard grammar's place in society.

You are quibbling over nothing. The point is that both camps deem that structure to be abusage, if you prefer "nonstandard" that's fine but it makes no difference to the point.

Grammar Puss

S Pinker

I hope to have convinced you of two things. Many prescriptive rules are just plain dumb and should be deleted from the usage handbooks. And most of standard English is just that, standard, in the sense of standard units of currency or household voltages. It is just common sense that people should be given every encouragement and opportunity to learn the dialect that has become the standard one in their society and to employ it in many formal settings. But there is no need to use terms like "bad grammar," "fractured syntax," and "incorrect usage" when referring to rural and Black dialects. Though I am no fan of "politically correct" euphemism (in which, according to the satire, "white woman" should be replaced by "melanin-impoverished person of gender"), using terms like "bad grammar" for "nonstandard" is both insulting and scientifically inaccurate.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

Barbara Scholz and I have taken to using the term correctness conditions for whatever are the actual conditions on your expressions that make them the expressions of your language " and likewise for anyone else's language. If you typically say I ain't got no hammer to explain that you don't have a hammer, then the correctness conditions for your dialect probably include a condition classifying ain't as a negative auxiliary, and a condition specifying that indefinite noun phrases in negated clauses take negative determiners, and a condition specifying that the subject precedes the predicate, and so on. The expressions of your language are the ones that comply with all the correctness conditions that are the relevant ones for you.

If you've read it then how it is that you missed the part about the Hawaian pidgin/Creole, Merry?

Prone as you are to prevarication and illustrative of your poor reading skills, see,.....

Prone as you are to prevarication and illustrative of your poor reading skills, see,.....

but this incredibly lame sentence is one to be kept as an example forever to be avoided in AI, though most machines know parsing terms (words and numbers) in all human languages better than you do:

Subject, object, verb - you ever heard of proper order?!

Truly I don't think that even the greatests linguists could explain to you the errors in that sentence of yours that I re-posted;

Robert wrote: JTT, you are moving the goalposts now. Sure, both camps "accept" abusage as "nonstandard", "colloquial" etc. There is a greater deal of acceptance of these things with descriptivism but this simply wasn't what we are talking about. The point I had been making is that both camps disagree with that bit of grammar, not whether they find it within themselves to accept nonstandard grammar's place in society.

You are quibbling over nothing. The point is that both camps deem that structure to be abusage, if you prefer "nonstandard" that's fine but it makes no difference to the point.

To prescriptivists of this sort, there is just nothing you can say, because they do not acknowledge any circumstances under which they might conceivably find that they are wrong about the language. If they believe infinitives shouldn't be split, it won't matter if you can show that every user of English on the planet has used split infinitives, they'll still say that nonetheless it's just wrong.

That's the opposite insanity to "anything that occurs is correct": it says "nothing that occurs is relevant". Both positions are completely nuts. But there is a rather more subtle position in the middle that isn't. That is the interesting and conceptually rather difficult truth that Zink does not perceive.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.html

For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.

All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all.

Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

The scandal of the language mavens began in the 18th Century. The London dialect had become an important world language, and scholars began to criticize it as they would any institution, in part to question the authority of the aristocracy. Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire.

The period also saw unprecedented social mobility, and anyone who wanted to distinguish himself as cultivated had to master the best version of English. These trends created a demand for handbooks and style manuals, which were soon shaped by market forces: the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore.

Most of the hobgoblins of contemporary prescriptive grammar (don't split infinitives, don't end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these 18th Century fads.

High Seas wrote: Subject, object, verb - you ever heard of proper order?! Clearly it's too much to expect syntactical discipline from a devotee of "creoles",

SVO language 
"noun Linguistics.
a type of language that has basic subject-verb-object word order, as English, Chinese, or Spanish.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/svo+language?qsrc=2446

SOV language 
"noun Linguistics.
a type of language that has basic subject-object-verb order, as Turkish, Japanese, or Tamil.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Sov+language

I wrote: It's a "subject-verb-object [SOV] language.

You are quibbling over nothing. The point is that both camps deem that structure to be abusage, if you prefer "nonstandard" that's fine but it makes no difference to the point.

Dialects are subjective. I can claim that "me want cookie" is a "youthful dialect" and the descriptivists that don't accept it are making a subjective decision on what constitutes a legitimate dialect.

Again, all abusage has a pattern of use at some level.

I was talking about descriptive thresholds being subjective, and you counter with your stock and store criticism about prescriptivism. It simply doesn't answer what I had said at all and it's like talking to an obnoxious parrot.

Repeating yourself ad nauseum doesn't make your point any more valid. There's no profit to be had (by either party it seems) to continue going in circles with you so if all you have to say is a simplistic criticism of prescriptivism then there's nothing more to discuss with you on the subject.