Please help, Effect or affect?

lesviolettes wrote:

It's so fuzzy I get a headache just looking at it...
But thank you for your time & effort, Tico (may I shorten your name?) It's a courageous try and I acknowledge it.

Sure. My friends call me "Tico." (... and some of my enemies as well. :wink: )

Quote:

Will you share a beer with me?

Sure. Here .... this one's large enough to share ....

http://home.earthlink.net/~mikerider/webpics/GuinnessBeer.jpg

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Will do, Tico (I'm no ennemy)!
[tchin!]
Where is heartland? Don't tell me it's everywhere...

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lesviolettes wrote:

Will do, Tico (I'm no ennemy)!
[tchin!]
Where is heartland? Don't tell me it's everywhere...

In my case it's Kansas, USA.

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Hi!
Great to meet nice people here!

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JTT: Funny, Tico, but Fowler isn't even mentioned in any of the modern grammar books stacked on my desk. He isn't cited in any of the bibliographies, nor is Michael Quinion. That's why Professor Nunberg [a source I cited] stated that Fowler is "out of date".

Would you like to know why? Because these two fellas are not language scientists. They are/were prescriptivists who haven't studied language enough to know how it works. I know how tenaciously you hang on to the flimsiest of "evidence".

==================

Source: The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English

In corpus based studies of actual usage for Fiction, News, and Academic Prose, 'which' is common in both restrictive and non-restrictive clauses.

In which category, restrictive or non-restrictive is 'which' more commonly used? In all three categories, 'which' is more common in restrictive clauses, and note well, by a fairly wide margin.

=====================

JTT: I failed to include the source for this material. My bad.

=================
Source: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

ii.
a. The necklace which her mother gave to her is in the safe. [integrated]

b. The necklace, which her mother gave to her, is in the safe. [supplementary]

The terms 'integrated' and 'supplementary' indicate the key differences between them: an integrated relative is tightly integrated into the matrix construction in terms of prosody, syntax, and meaning, whereas a supplementary relative clause is related only loosely to the surrounding structure.

... but it must be emphasized that punctuation is ... not a wholly reliable guide: it is by no means uncommon to find clauses that are not marked off punctuationally even though the syntax and/or meaning requires that they be interpreted as supplementary.

===============

JTT: As you can plainly see, Tico, the identical sentence, with 'which' operating as the relative pronoun, can function as both a restrictive clause (integrated) or a non-restrictive clause (supplementary).

Also, commas are not always a sign of non-restrictiveness.

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What does "my bad" mean, please?

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quote: a. The necklace which her mother gave to her is in the safe. [integrated]

I think it's more usual to say:
"the necklace my mother gave her etc...", or am I wrong?

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lesviolettes wrote:

What does "my bad" mean, please?

It is colloquial for "my mistake."

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Ah, thanks, Tico!
I'm just a non native, you see! (lol)

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lesviolettes wrote:

quote: a. The necklace which her mother gave to her is in the safe. [integrated]

I think it's more usual to say:
"the necklace my mother gave her etc...", or am I wrong?

You've changed the sentence, LV and the meaning.

Many things determine whether a bare relative, that relative or a wh relative is used. Register, writing versus speech, register within writing, ...

'my bad' means my mistake/my error.

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Thanks for the explanation about "my bad"

How could I have changed the meaning of the sentence? I copied & pasted!

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lesviolettes wrote:

Thanks for the explanation about "my bad"

How could I have changed the meaning of the sentence? I copied & pasted!

lesviolettes wrote:

quote: a. The necklace which her mother gave to her is in the safe. [integrated]

I think it's more usual to say:
"the necklace my mother gave her etc...", or am I wrong?

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JTT: I need not hold onto any "evidence" on this point, as I've plainly indicated this is the rule I follow ... but no one else need follow it.

And since none of us here are "language scientists," I suggest my rule to be a good rule to follow. As Quinion writes:

Quinion wrote:

If your sense of the language is not strong enough to be sure of the right pronoun, use that for the restrictive cases and which for the others and you won't go wrong.

... or you can use which and hope you've used it correctly, and that your punctuation is correct.

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Changing "her" to "my" changes the meaning, but in a very irrelevant way.

lesviolettes: "The necklace her mother gave her ..." is fine.

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quote: a. The necklace which her mother gave to her is in the safe. [integrated]

I think it's more usual to say:
"the necklace my mother gave her etc...", or am I wrong?

OK, I copied & pasted JTT's text but made the mistake of writing "my" instead of "her" in my text. Doesn't change anything in my message, though.

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Thank you, Tico!

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are there mods, here, or...

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lesviolettes wrote:

are there mods, here, or...

Yes there are, and they do an exeedingly fine job.

Whereabouts are you from?

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Ticomaya wrote:

JTT: I need not hold onto any "evidence" on this point, as I've plainly indicated this is the rule I follow ... but no one else need follow it.

I'll suggest that a careful parsing of your language would reveal otherwise. How do you think you can escape the natural rules of your language? It's clear that you don't hold on to any evidence for there is none. You're just regurgitating something you've heard.

Why do you think that these 'rules' have to be taught again and again, yet no one, deploying their language in a natural manner, uses them

Of course, in conversation, 'that' predominates, so, of course, it seems most natural. This "proof" probably has given you the mistaken impression that this prescription has some merit. It doesn't.

But in the course of a few postings, you've gone from "what I use to what is a good rule and back to what I use" and look below, in the next breath you're once again proclaiming it a rule.

And since none of us here are "language scientists," I suggest my rule to be a good rule to follow.

This reveals your modus operandi in all your discussions here, Tico. "I'm not an expert so I'm free to follow any old nonsense as long as it conforms to my preconceived notions of what I want the world to be like".

One doesn't have to be a language scientist to note that a "rule" isn't being followed. This dissonance alerts thinking people and it causes them to question. Then they research, do studies, test.

NOTE that you've completely avoided this set of documented proofs I've given you. Is that what a thinking person does? NOTE that you've completely disregarded what language science has to say about this. Is that what a thinking person does? And now, below, you're quoting Quinion AGAIN.

How can anyone take anything you say seriously? [rhetorical question]

As Quinion writes:

Quinion wrote:
If your sense of the language is not strong enough to be sure of the right pronoun, use that for the restrictive cases and which for the others and you won't go wrong.

... or you can use which and hope you've used it correctly, and that your punctuation is correct.

You, and Mr Quinion are operating under the completely nonsensical notion that the grammar stuff you're taught in school gives you a sense of the language.

[quote]

Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.

Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules.

So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations.

The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Someone, somewhere, must be making decisions about "correct English" for the rest of us. Who?

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits.

Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range.

William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! Kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it. 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 {Quinion, in this case} are oblivious. [/quote]

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JTT wrote:

This reveals your modus operandi in all your discussions here, Tico. "I'm not an expert so I'm free to follow any old nonsense as long as it conforms to my preconceived notions of what I want the world to be like".

As I've said before, ... please ... let me repeat that ... PLEASE feel free to ignore all future postings of mine.

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