prescriptivist statement or as a descriptivist one

jotham · Post by **jotham** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:14 am

That, and ironing out the discrepancy between 'don't frown at established usages' yet somehow 'find them illogical'.

Not frowning at illogical usages means they accept it as English despite the illogic. It wouldn't make sense to change tradition.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:31 am

It wouldn't make sense to change tradition.

And why not?

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:37 am

jotham wrote:This is an amazing essay I was not aware of. She apparently was in the same school as C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. She hits on a lot of the topics I was referring to. What do you find questionable about her main point, which is that children should learn how to learn, and not just learn? She mentions theology, because at the time of the essay, perhaps that was part of the curriculum of the time. Do you think that her point means that education will necessarily become Christian just because she mentions it?
http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html

To be honest, I haven't re-read her essay beyond the parts I quoted and commented upon before. However, assuming that you are paraphrasing her ('children should learn how to learn, and not just learn'), that sounds like hand-waving to me. What is of primary interest to me is WHAT is to be learnt, and that will soon lead into a consideration of how it will be(come) learnt: like I've said somewhere before, doing the opposite is like putting a non-existent or at best pretty empty-looking rickety cart before a dodgy-looking horse.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:40 am

metal56 wrote:
It wouldn't make sense to change tradition.
And why not?

My response to Jotham there is more 'But they (the prescriptivists) DO want to change things (the language/society, to fit in with their ideas and/or accept their power even more), and what's traditional about that?!'.

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:56 am

and what's traditional about that?!'.

Traditional methods of the power-hungry?

Anuradha Chepur · Post by **Anuradha Chepur** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 11:29 am

I must admit that I do sense the potential of generativist approaches for those fields, but from the little I've read, I rather gathered that empirical approaches have proven to be of greater practicality and immediate help - it seems easier to have a computer act according to probabilities rather than trying to painstakingly formulate rules and algorithms for it to ((also) mindlessly) follow.

Principles of generative grammar are, infact, empirically motivated!
Though the computing of language was not the goal of generative linguists, their theories are so readily applicable for it.

And a computer is mindless.

Anuradha Chepur · Post by **Anuradha Chepur** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 11:36 am

Could that be because precriptivists and generativists share a lot of the same mindset?

Give me a break.

Prescriptivists tell us what is grammatical or ungrammatical.
Generativists try to find out the 'why' of a particular string that has been judged as grammatical/ungrammatical by native users of the language.
A generativist may work on a language he can't speak or understand, based on data collected from informants who are native users of that language.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 12:42 pm

All linguists are interested in the reasons for grammaticality (or lack thereof), but generativists certainly are among the keenest to tell us what isn't supposed to be possible when, in fact, it is; as for looking at data collected from informants, there is often a fair bit of disagreement about what is and isn't usual or acceptable (just look at this forum!) - it might be better to depend on spontaneous/more anonymous usage rather than elicitation or questionnaire etc.

Things may of course be changing in that camp, and you are right, there has been a lot of work done on all sorts of languages even under the UG banner (not just on English), but wouldn't you agree that they sometimes seem a bit too keen to shoe-horn potentially recalcitrant data into apriori categories (i.e. P & P, minimalism). It's great of course to have a guy like Chomsky come along and shake things up, inspire a generation of linguists, but with the quantity of data now available, maybe linguists should look at things afresh and without too many preconceptions.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 3:33 pm

I'm intrigued as to what counts as "illogical" use of the language. It's natural language, not computer code or lojban!

metal56 · Post by **metal56** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 11:17 pm

I'm intrigued as to what counts as "illogical" use of the language.

Well, I guess if you want a cup of tea and you say to the waiteress "I want a coffee", it would be illogical usage.

jotham · Post by **jotham** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 3:25 am

I'm intrigued as to what counts as "illogical" use of the language.

There are many examples. The one that comes to mind now is the idiom for conscience' sake. According to the rules, we would put an s behind the apostrophe. Despite the apparent illogic, grammarians and linguists alike accept it as English, and no one dares change it, just as few dare change English spelling to be easier. Grammarians don't frown on it; it's just English — end of discussion; end of debate.

And a computer is mindless.

Well, you may have hit on another difference between functionalists and generativists. In a functionalist viewpoint, there isn't an enitity of thought or mind, so a computer is no more mindless than a human; inversely put, a human is no more "mindful" than a computer. There shouldn't be a difference in the functionalists mind (or whatever they have), which is why they're so eager to have animals communicate as humans and to create computer programs that can translate as perfectly as competent translators: to prove that humans are no better than living animals or dead computers. Computers don't think; they're programmed. So are humans, say they — programmed by the culture around them.
Generativists admit that the human mind does exist, and that psychologists have a legitimate field of interest. Otherwise, psychologists just as well observe, analyze, and help out computers with their personal problems to boot.

Miss Elenious · Post by **Miss Elenious** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 6:31 am

metal56 wrote:

What would you do if one of your students produced the sentence "I'd like to can swim" in class? What would you say to him/her? And if the same student said "Is that sentence allowed in English?", what would be your reply?

It depends. If it was free production speech I wouldn't do anything. If we were practising sentences with what students would like to do I would correct it, or write the mistake on the board to draw his/her attention, or ask for clarification, or even let the other students correct it (students sometimes correct eachother and this can be very influential. They pick up eachother's mistakes no matter how often I say something. So I guess it works the other way round, too)

Being a second language learner myself since I was a child I try to recall the ways I learned English. I was taught in the traditional method and the only
way grammar rules helped me was just to show off to native speakers. On the contrary, I learnt more effectively when I was more observant and related situations with grammar use or even songs with grammar use.

When I teach grammar I break it down to simple rules, most of the times as simple as a math sructure and gradually build on it. I also give students funny and striking examples.

I like grammar. Any grammar. Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, English. I even like studying rules and structures. But I don't want to bore my students with memorising rules. What's the use?

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 10:01 am

jotham wrote:There are many examples. The one that comes to mind now is the idiom for conscience' sake. According to the rules, we would put an s behind the apostrophe. Despite the apparent illogic, grammarians and linguists alike accept it as English, and no one dares change it, just as few dare change English spelling to be easier. Grammarians don't frown on it; it's just English---end of discussion; end of debate.

So "illogical" means when real world usage appears not to fit the "rules"? There are several reasons why that may happen: Sometimes the "rule" is an oversimplification (or just plain wrong), sometimes the evolution of a language throws up "exceptions", sometimes a form may be preferred for ease of pronunciation (I suspect that would account for for conscience' sake).

English spelling isn't "illogical", it's just that its spelling doesn't always reflect pronunciation of a word, but rather its history/etymology.

Anuradha Chepur · Post by **Anuradha Chepur** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 11:57 am

No, prescriptivists are not interested in the underlying reasons for
(un)grammaticality. All native speakers will judge the sentence in the OP as ungrammatical. Some of us who have studied the language will know that is is wrong because in English modal auxiliaries like can and must can't be used in infinitivals. But why can't we use them in infinitivals, what is the underlying principle? This is what is the preoccupation of generativists of not only the Chomskyan stream, but also HSPG and LFG exponents.

I think I saw that article where Geoffrey Pullum tried to write something by writing off something as nothing but 'affix-hop' etc. and made it absolutely clear that he hasn't actually read, much less understood what he was writing off.

Generativists are not telling what something is supposed or not to be. They are into the technology of language, trying to get to how the human mind processes it. The proof of the pudding etc.: the information technology industry finds it readily useful for developing applications, which is why generativists are in demand to team up with software professionals.

There are no preconceptions in generative grammars. Infact minimalism, is called a program and not a theory because it is ongoing research, subject to revisions. Generativists are always throwing their earlier versions if they have arrived at a better one, just as it happens in case of computer languages or operating systems. Whereas Pullums etc are still stuck with traditional fairy tales.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 5:54 am

Once again Jotham you are (dis)crediting functionalists for having no conception of 'mind'. I refer you back to a link that I posted for you before:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 2564#32564

Hmm, 'for conscience' sake', if I'd ever had to write that before now, I'd've probably added an 's', and I would not have considered it wrong.

AC, on the second page of the above linked thread, about two-thirds of the way down, is a post I made which contains several Language Log posts by Pullum - not sure why you are dishing him ('fairy tales'?!). And how's this for an appraisal of the Minimialist program, by a Chomskyite:
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~jim/sampsonreview.html
(Sampson includes the quoted passage in Hurford's review himself, in the revised edition of his book published by Continuum in 2005 (retitled from 'Educating Eve' to 'The Language Instinct Debate (Revised Edition)').