one of ...

[Stephen Jones]

Looking at one language through the eyes of another always has this effect.

After all what is one to say of a language where little girls are neuter?

Unlike you I don't see too much evidence of flux in condordance in English. I would need clear statistiics to suggest any change. All of the examples you have given have existed longer than I have.

And in your three examples you forgot this one, where the use of the plural verb is compulsory.
A lot of students were sent home with chickenpox.

Here we have the singular marker 'a' and yet we are obliged to use a plural noun. I think this makes it clear that the relationship between form and meaning in English is not as tight as you suggest it should be.

[JuanTwoThree]

Change may well be initiated by "the lower classes" but their voice is not heard unless the particular usage is reluctantly adopted by the middle. If we were completely democratic, we'd accept double negatives as used by millions of people. Just counting heads would make "I didn't do nothing" more respectable than "If I were you". Which it isn't.

It's partly geography, in the UK at least. Economic, educational, cultural and therefore linguistic power is firmly based round, though not necessarily in, London. Granted there are bourgeois islands in other areas , but their children are often educated or start working within the pale. So most of the decision-makers at the BBC, the publishers, the 'papers and the "best" universities are huddled together in the South East.

Nevertheless, change takes place and it's a rearguard and doomed battle to fight it. My father railed against "Hopefully....." and tried to make us use shall/will correctly, according to him, though we caught him out more often than not. My teachers, pompous gits, said "I'm sure you can go to the lavatory JuanTwoThree, but the question is if you may".

What I don't see is why some changes are accepted, like can for permission, but we don't all say I ain't/You ain't/ We ain't. Or one of us are, for that matter .

[revel]

Good afternoon.

Did anyone else see this documentary?

An experiment was done in a small English speaking community. Pre-hypothosis study showed that the way in which most people in the community pronounced a certain vowel sound could be traced to the way a wealthy and influential woman in that community pronounced that sound. The experiment was to ask this woman to change her way of pronouncing this vowel, to see if her neighbors would do the same. They did.

Just 2 cents worth on where linguistic evolution might find, in part, its genesis.

peace,
revel.

[Stephen Jones]

The general consensus among socio-linguists is that the push for change comes from socially aspirational lower-class women. Now of course what happens is that the changes they bring about are the forms that they consider to be prestigious, as opposed to the forrms that actually are.

Now much of this research was done before the people to be emulated became Estuary English speaking footballers and fashion models. What Hermione Bucket does when the model of diction to be copied is that of her oafish brother-in-law has not been documented.

The classic study on how people's pronunciation varied according to circumstance was conducted in New York by Labov in the sixties. He got his helpers to stand in Macey's and ask for a department that was on the third floor. They then noted whether the 'r' in third was prnounced or not. What they found was that the incidence of pronouncing the 'r' (which was considered the prestige pronunciation at that time) varied according to the clothes and accent of the person who asked the questiion - the higher up the social scale the person asking the quesition was perceived to be the greater the frequency of the prestige variety. Another interesting thing is that it appears that the prestige of the two alternative pronunciations has become inverted in receny years (and, of course, in the UK the difference would be purely regional and have no connotations of prestige apart from the relative prestige of the different regions).

What I don't see is why some changes are accepted, like can for permission, but we don't all say I ain't/You ain't/ We ain't. Or one of us are, for that matter .

'Can I/We' has always been used for permission, It is only semi-educated pedants who labour under the mistaken apprehension that the only correct form is "May I". There is a long list of so-called grammatical rules that have no basis in fact, but have been peddled by those with little learning and less sense since the eighteenth century. Among them are the 'rule' you can't end a sentence with a preposition, that 'It's me' should be replaced by 'It's I' (nobody ever asks the more interesting question of why we say 'It's me' and not 'I'm me' as the rules of concordance would seem to require) and that 'he's bigger than me' should be replaced by 'he's bigger than I', that 'none of us' must be followed by a singular verb, and that you can never split an infinitive.

With regard to 'ain't' the change in the States has from it's being accepted as a legitimate form to being considered sub-standard. In the UK it has always been considered sub-standard, so presumably the original colonists of America came from an area where the construction was common.

'One of us are' is never going to be accepted as standard because change in the standard is normally the result of non-standard forms taking over. As you have already pointed out Juan, the particular phrase you are referring to is not used by anybody.

[woodcutter]

An old-fashioned regard for possibly outdated or even misguided rules has this advantage. It allows a teacher to say whether is student is "correct" or not, and allocate a mark. It seems to me that the more accurate and sophisticated linguists of today have not quite worked out how this ought to be done. Which is a bit of a problem.

[Duncan Powrie]

An old-fashioned regard for possibly outdated or even misguided rules has this advantage. It allows a teacher to say whether is student is "correct" or not, and allocate a mark. It seems to me that the more accurate and sophisticated linguists of today have not quite worked out how this ought to be done. Which is a bit of a problem.

As any sophisticated linguist will tell you (and I think I can count myself as one*), they mark both items as correct, and leave it up to the dear poor bewildered students** to make up their minds which they would prefer to use.

* Typed Gilderoy Lockheart (Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets)-style.

** See *, except with added irony (if GR is capable of such a thing).

[Stephen Jones]

I have nothing against prescriptive grammar, but I do believe, as in medicine, you are under an obligation to get the prescription right.

[woodcutter]

That's the problem. How do you do that, without slighting some oppressed English user?

[Harzer]

Well, Stephen I don't think I forgot about "a lot of X + Vplural" so much as expected it to be subsumed under Category 1 which is illustrated by "a number of X + Vplural".

I am not advocating anything BTW. I am simply trying to suggest that in English the Subject-Verb relationship is in a state of disorder with a number of competing conventions operating. This leads me to think that maybe in a generation or two this will have resolved itself into a single clear and binding pattern, and my guess is that that pattern will be, however distasteful it may be to us now, this:

The number of a verb is determined by the number of the noun/pronoun immediately preceding it.

Ex. What had appeared to him to be a human form lurking in the shadows were on closer examination nothing more than a bush blown by the wind.

An alternative solution would be to remove number from the verb system, where it is already vestigial, and where we already have a great many speakers using forms like "we/you/they was".

Well, that's enough from me. But I will close with a quote from a student essay that I read today:

"According to Gellert, the existence of nations, like states, are dependent on a multiplicity of factors ..."

Harzer

[Stephen Jones]

That's the problem. How do you do that, without slighting some oppressed English user?

The oppressed don't count. The standard form of the language is the social dialect of the oppressors, by definition.

[woodcutter]

It would be OK with me if Harzer's rule took over the world. Sure would make things easier.

Stephen, you may well be right. But I don't think that the academic community in general can accept that, do you? And any prescriptive rule will have a sell by date. Who decides when the time has come to abandon it?

[Stephen Jones]

But I don't think that the academic community in general can accept that, do you?

I wans't aware that there was such a thing as the academic communtiy in general, and if there were I am sure it would be too busy infighting to make any decisions whatsoever.

You can argue as to whether it is useful to have a standard dialect or not _- I would argue it is very useful, particularly for a language that us used as a lingua franca by others - but few dispute that if you are going to have one it is going to be the dialect of the dominant classes (if it weren't they wouldn't be dominant).

As for the sell-by date of any prescriptive rule, as a prescriptive grammar should be based on the descriptive grammar of what is accepted as the standard dialect, then when the standard dialect changes the prescriptive rule will too. This is what I meant by saying we had to get the prescription right.

I wasn't the one in this thread apologizing for "An old-fashioned regard for possibly outdated or even misguided rules".

[woodcutter]

Who makes these prescriptive rules? In France they are governed by an academy, and we hoot and cackle. However I think we also have an informal academy comprised of the big dictionaries, Fowler, Lynne Truss, Bill Bryson and mouldy old text books in high schools which tell us not to split infinitives. The teachers don't bother to teach that kind of thing now, but still believe it, because we look down on prescriptivism so much that there isn't probably isn't a source of information about modern grammatical usage that high school teachers are aware of.

Prescriptive grammar writing is an arbitrary, minority bashing business, and we need an arbitrary, pompous institution to set and constantly revise some proper rules for it, rather than relying on 18th century eccentrics, as we now tend to do.

[Duncan Powrie]

It's becoming a bit hard to follow your argument, Woodcutter, although there may be some who can still understand what it is you are driving at exactly (you seem to be a defender of linguistic diversity, but you want an institution set up to tell everybody what to think and do?! Institutions almost by definition don't exactly encourage diversity).

There are many perfectly adequate descriptions already available whose focus is, unsurprisingly, more synchronic description (descriptions which will become less and less concerned with providing diachronic perspectives as forms become outmoded and obsolescent), and such descriptions do make an effort to include minority or non-standard uses; furthermore, such findings are also now eminently replicable and comparable thanks to the growing awareness of methodology in Corpus Linguistics (e.g. corpus design/compilation), and the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) etc.

(In fact, if you look at most dictionaries and grammar books, they are all more or less saying the same thing nowadays, converging in what they recommend as being not only possible but probable regarding the linguistic choices we can/could/"should" make).

We are therefore increasingly in a position where we can comfortably follow our natural instincts, even in writing, because those instincts will be borne out in the references we can now consult; the references are the instincts, the "performance" data not merely a reflection of so-called "competence", but actually a record of competency itself in using the language, for a variety of purposes.

Who on earth would now want to hand matters over (or more likely, "back") to an English Academy? A good enough job is already being done of describing the language, by a collection of institutions that are potentially greater than the sum of their parts, and the available descriptions are consequently surely ones in which people can now trust.

We really don't need somebody to tell us what is "good" or "bad" English when we can have this "real" English to guide us and help us make informed, linguistically-effective (and more "judgement-free"), individual decisions; we aren't uneducated peasants living in an information Dark Age any longer (at least, not those of us with access to Dave's, and now this post ).

Hopefully it won't take an institutional decree to get teachers to refer to these descriptions, either. Just saying, "You are a bad bad bad bad teacher!!!" should be enough.

[woodcutter]

Well, let me clarify, if I can.

Linguistic diversity should be protected. Regions should protect their own culture and colour. However, we cannot expect to teach whatever regional English we happen to speak.

What I am am expected to teach is not my own dialect or idiolect, but straight, standard English. I have no problem with that, there is no other way than to have a standard, if we set a general exam, and no standard to use than that of the already over-priviledged. That standard is not well defined. Whether a thing is "wrong" or not is, as Duncan says, somewhat down to the particular instinct of a teacher. Some teachers no doubt have very poor instincts, so "wrong" for students in their classes is something very unpredictable. Those students should have recourse to an authority which will refute their teachers, if they are marked oddly in an exam. OK, the OED more or less fills this role in Britain, but you don't have to accept what the OED says if you don't feel like it. I believe that the role of the academy is not to say "good English" and "bad English", but "this year we judge people are saying it like this in British RP, and if Mr.Smith marks you wrong in the general exam, you go tell your daddy". That way we kill off the "boldly go" boredom once and for all.