Periods Meeting Quotes

The whole problem with JTT's virtually exclusive reliance on Pinker for language guidance is that Pinker is not a linguist or language specialist.

but I often type-speak colloquially.

Pinker seems to be saying the same thing I am...but I must acknowledge that he said it much, much better.

JTT is hung up on one of the extremes...and she wants to call the other extreme utterly insane.

Watta ya gonna say to someone who takes that position?

Sometimes an alleged grammatical "error" is logical not only in the sense of "rational," but in the sense of respecting distinctions made by the logician. Consider this alleged barbarism:

Everyone returned to their seats. If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone. No one should have to sell their home to pay for medical care.

The mavens explain: [everyone] means [every one], a singular subject, which may not serve as the antecedent of a plural pronoun like [them] later in the sentence. "Everyone returned to [his] seat," they insist. "If anyone calls, tell [him] I can't come to the phone."

If you were the target of these lessons, you might be getting a bit uncomfortable. [Everyone returned to his seat] makes it sound like Bruce Springsteen was discovered during intermission to be in the audience, and everyone rushed back and converged on his seat to await an autograph.

If there is a good chance that a caller may be female, it is odd to ask one's roommate to tell [him] anything (even if you are not among the people who get upset about "sexist language").

Such feelings of disquiet -- a red flag to any serious linguist -- are well-founded. The logical point that everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasps is that [everyone] and [they] are not an antecedent and a pronoun referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a "quantifier" and a "bound variable," a different logical relationship. [Everyone returned to their seats] means "For all X, X returned to X's seat." The "X" is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships: the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The [their] there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all.

On logical grounds, then, variables are not the same thing as the more familiar "referential" pronouns that trigger agreement ([he] meaning to some particular guy, [they] meaning some particular bunch of guys).

Some languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for referential pronouns and for variables. But English is stingy; a referential pronoun must be drafted into service to lend its name when a speaker needs to use a variable. There is no reason that the vernacular decision to borrow [they, their, them] for the task is any worse than the prescriptivists' recommendation of [he, him, his]. Indeed, [they] has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences.

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

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Re: Frank Apisa (Post 5049397)
Quote:
Pinker seems to be saying the same thing I am...but I must acknowledge that he said it much, much better.

JTT is hung up on one of the extremes...and she wants to call the other extreme utterly insane.

Watta ya gonna say to someone who takes that position?

I suspect that you probably will wanna retract your first statement, Frank.

Surely you can see rancour arising when the sofa sprawler challenges the whale spotter with dirtying up the planet and disturbing the whales

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 Frank A, Roberta, Robert, Spendi, Osso, ... does not perceive

There are however, some of my own comments tucked into the text, pointing to how what Professor Pullum says applies to those here you argue, but truly don not understand these issues.

Your remark is merely self flattery in the farmerman vein.

The following paragraph describes prescriptions, Frank. It points out what I've pointed out. That you, Roberta, Spendi, [lamely] anyone who tries to defend a prescription never offers anything in the way of proof.

I only apply that as a tool so that a clevis bolt like yourself is able to respond at something concrete as you seem to have trouble with the abstract.

believes there is any logic to logic other then

Not saying that its 100% correct

Nope. Do not want to retract at all. Pinker does indeed (at least in this article) seem to be saying that there are extremes to the prescriptionist/descriptionist controversy, and that a better position is probably found somewhere away from the extremes.

And now we come to the biggest and most bogus controversy of them all. The fact that many prescriptive rules are worth keeping does not imply that every pet peeve, bit of grammatical folklore, or dimly remembered lesson from Miss Grundy’s classroom is worth keeping.

Many prescriptive rules originated for screwball reasons, impede clear and graceful prose, and have been flouted by English’s greatest writers for centuries.

The most notorious is the ban on split verbs (including split infinitives), which led Chief Justice and grammatical stickler John Roberts to precipitate a governance crisis in 2009 when he unconsciously edited the oath of office and had Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully” (rather than “faithfully execute,” the wording stipulated in the Constitution).

Bogus rules, which proliferate like urban legends and are just as hard to eradicate, are responsible for vast amounts of ham-fisted copy editing and smarty-pants one-upmanship.

Yet when language experts try to debunk the spurious rules, the dichotomizing mindset imagines that they are trying to abolish all standards of good writing. It is as if anyone who proposed repealing a stupid law, like those on miscegenation or Sunday store closings, was labeled an anarchist.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_good_word/2012/05/steven_pinker_on_the_false_fronts_in_the_language_wars_.single.html

My comment earlier was:

Both are extreme...and both probably are less useful than a position somewhere in from those edges. But to describe them as "utterly insane" is a greater insult to the language than what any of us on the other side of this issue have generated, JTT.

Grammar prescriptions may be worthless to JTT and Professor Plum...but if a student is being tested on grammar rules his/her teacher thinks to be important, the score on the test is going to reflect the prejudices of the teacher...not of the other two.

Not saying that its 100% correct,
but several writers of fiction had used AND or BUT to start sentences.