Ill-founded arguments about grammar

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/arguments/

by kafkaesque • 14 years ago

28 47 14 years ago

motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com

zeteo4• 14 years ago

If neither usage (#1) nor logic (#2) are acceptable authorities, then language becomes an arbitrary construct subject to everyone's whims. As the author promptly proceeds to show with his unsupported assertion that "different than is perfectly fine".

antiterra2• 14 years ago

And that's exactly how we lost declensions and gained a bunch of Latinate vocabulary. There's no Académie Anglais.

jmj42• 14 years ago

But language _is_ an arbitrary construct subject wholly to societal agreement. That's why language evolves over time, why different dialects of a given language develop, etc.

Edit: Spelling

zeteo4• 14 years ago

Web standards were also initially an arbitrary social construct. That doesn't mean we want them to change every year according to the latest popular fancies.

dazmax3• 14 years ago

He didn't attack arguments based on usage, just outdated usage. The point of syntax is to be understood, not to prove you are educated. I'd hope you know what I mean when I say 'different than'. Language is going to change no matter what; being a prescriptivist means leading a significantly more annoyed life.

zeteo4• 14 years ago

All usage is outdated to some degree. Last year's buzzwords are this year's forgotten fancies.

michaelhoffman2• 14 years ago

What the author says is that "usage from years past" does not form some sort of authority. That is a different thing from today's usage, as described in dictionaries.

nollidge4• 14 years ago

I defy you to support your implicit assertion that "different than" is not fine.

zeteo4• 14 years ago

I defy you to stop being so tribalistic. I didn't take position on any side of the "different than" controversy. All I said is that the author did not support his assertion.

bane3• 14 years ago

"then language becomes an arbitrary construct subject to everyone's whims"

ding ding ding, you're starting to get it!

More seriously, language can be thought of as a middle ground between production of an external symbol as a realization of thought, and interpretation of that symbol in another mind.

Even using language adhering to the strictest of grammars, there can be room for misunderstanding in the mind of the interpreter as they will be decoding your symbol expressions through a lens of their own understanding. Adhering to the model you think best does not guarantee clarity of communication!

You adjust the production model you use in order to better suit the interpretation model your audience is using. If your use of language is skillful enough, you can even help the audience select from several competing language models in order to add nuance -- you can speak in a vernacular or in a formal mode.

antiterra2• 14 years ago

Oddly enough, past usage is one of the best arguments against prescriptivist proclamations of right and wrong. We find that the "aks" pronunciation of ask has an unbroken lineage and usage from African American Vernacular English to Southern American English to Old English. Nouns can be verbed all kinds of ways and often have been if you check the OED. Being aware and in control of your verbal 'appearance' is useful, particularly in formal situations. However, smugly deriding the grammar or spelling of someone who has communicated with practical clarity is a despicable and misguided sport.

abraininavat2• 14 years ago

The phrase "verbal appearance" is genius and really summarizes my feelings on grammar. One shouldn't dismiss a person because of his appearance, but one would be wise to consider that he's more likely to be taken seriously if his appearance is up to par. The idea applies just as well to grammar.

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

Only if you take "appearance is up to par" to mean "fitting in with the crowd" or else you are swapping objective judgements on grammar for objective judgments on clothes and grooming, and begging the question.

devindotcom6• 14 years ago

While I agree with some of his ideas (despite being something of a prescriptivist when it comes to my own writing), they're not exactly "ill-founded" as much as "the author disagrees with them."

"language is not a logical system" -_communication_ is not a logical system, but language is.

dazmax3• 14 years ago

Linguists have been working on a formal syntax for natural language for more than a hundred years and still haven't succeeded completely. I'd say formal logic is a language, not the reverse. You have to take away a lot of what we do with language to get it to work as a logical system.

shadowfox• 14 years ago

> "language is not a logical system" -_communication_ is not a logical system, but language is.

Care to explain this?

From most NLP classes I have taken and work I have done, I have always understood that languages are logical only in a very loose sense of that word. It is pretty hard to express grammar systems in formal logic for most practical human languages as far as I know.

Maybe I am missing something?

devindotcom6• 14 years ago

Language is systematic communication, and while it's imperfect, it has basic logical underpinnings. The fact that some sentences and words work and others don't is proof enough of that. It's arbitrary, yes, like any artificial system, but it's a system nevertheless. Deviations from the system as we understand it ("effective" but not "right," as suggested above) help further define it. This is all just my personal ideas about it, though, not like I've made a study of it my whole life.

TillE• 14 years ago

How does descriptivism deal with people who are just plain wrong? To pick one example among many, a recent trend I've noticed is people who use "equivocate" when they really mean "equate". Should they be corrected, or should we simply accept that because a lot of people are doing it and we can understand from context what they really mean, it's now an appropriate usage? Where exactly is that line drawn?

michaelhoffman2• 14 years ago

In general you can find accepted and common usage in a dictionary. I doubt you will find this meaning of "equivocate" in any dictionary today.

Prescriptivists usually go beyond the dictionary to enforce ideas of language that they got using the problematic methods described in the linked article.

dazmax3• 14 years ago

'Cloud' used to mean hill.

lmm• 14 years ago

If they're understood, they're not wrong. If they're causing confusion (and you can understand them only because the rest of the sentence makes it clear - you would understand just as well if they had said "foo" rather than "equate") then that's worth questioning. The way we use many words now (condone and fulsome spring immediately to mind) would have reasonably been described as "plain wrong" twenty years ago.

abraininavat2• 14 years ago

Replace "right" and "wrong" with "effective" and "ineffective" and I think it better captures what you're saying.

devindotcom6• 14 years ago

Well, given context, they could use any word at all, even the opposite of the correct one, and could be understood. The problem is that it seems foolish to allow that the person is correct in using the incorrect word, or that the word in question now means the same as the correct word. Effectiveness is a continuum, too - would they have communicated more effectively by using the correct word? Then that word is preferable, though not necessary to impart the meaning in the greater context.

baddox• 14 years ago

> If they're understood, they're not wrong.

Not quite. Merely being understood isn't the only possible goal of human language. Usually, speakers also want to appear educated and reliable, and using grammatical rules that the largest possible portion of your audience agrees with is a good way to do that.

grey-area• 14 years ago

There is no line. To take another example, in British English, alternate does not mean a kind of alternative, whereas in American English, this is now accepted usage. Is this wrong? Not really any more, and certainly not to a large enough group of speakers to normalise the usage. Language often evolves through mistakes, particularly in words which sound similar (see loose versus lose for another example which will probably change from an error to a change in common usage over time). So I imagine most descriptivists would simply refuse to accept that there is a clear line between error and evolution in language usage.

tmoertel5• 14 years ago

One point that most grammar discussions seem to miss is that grammar is a model of how people communicate, not the real thing. When a construction is labeled "ungrammatical," then, it could be, as the prescriptivists would have us believe, that the construction is indeed poor at communicating the intended meaning and side-tones. But it could also be that the construction is perfectly effective and the model has simply failed to capture that aspect of reality.

A large part of rhetoric, for example, is breaking grammar for effect.

yarianluis• 14 years ago

So if breaking grammar provides certain effects, wouldn't the standardization of such constructs into canon grammar diminish the effect?

devindotcom6• 14 years ago

In other words, can exceptions to rules be rules themselves?

tmoertel5• 14 years ago

I came, I saw, I conquered.

Those words are powerful, but not because they form a comma splice. That is, their power does not derive from failing the model's rules. Rather, the model's rules fail to capture that those words are powerful. (Or even allowed.)

Again, grammar is a model. A model that people don't actually use to communicate with one another. Nobody hears words and constructs a parse tree to figure out what they mean. So what's encoded in the model (or not) has little effect on the effect that the words actually have.

Change the model all you want. Nobody will hear any differently.

EDIT: P.S. When I wrote that rhetoric was "breaking grammar for effect," I didn't mean to imply that the effect of rhetoric came from breaking grammar. Rather, I meant that the focus in rhetoric is on the effect and, because grammar fails to admit many effective phrasings, rhetoric necessarily "breaks grammar" from the outset.

mbetter• 14 years ago

CWWWWW we w W SSS Crrr rrrrrr vv sda Sdf

That means "more anything can mean anything descriptivist nonsense." Please let me know when your model has been adjusted.

hythloday• 14 years ago

Please let me know when your model has been adjusted.

Perhaps when you stop having to explain what it means? :)

edmond_dantes• 14 years ago

Stephen Fry's discussion on language and grammar pedants (https://youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY).

Ill-founded arguments about grammar

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