cross-posting

[Joe Pickett]

Thanks, Larry, for alerting me to this. I looked at this last week, and
Geoff Nunberg is aware of this too.

The author of this article, Peter Corey, is an extreme traditionalist,
whose quest seems to be logical consistency in language. An "epilogue" to
his book is entitled "How Linguistics Killed Grammar."

A couple of the "mistakes" that he observes in AHD are that "like" is
identified as a preposition, and "none" as a pronoun.
Among the reasons he gives for "like" not being a preposition is that,
unlike any other preposition, "like" can be negated by the prefix un-.
(The AHD deals with this by listing "unlike" as a preposition as well as an
adjective.)  "None" is not a pronoun, in Corey's view, because it can be
"modified" by "almost," and pronouns cannot be modified by definition, ergo
. . .

Far be it from me to say that the categorization of words into traditional
parts of speech is unencumbered by ambiguity, but I can't see investing a
lot of time to refute such assertions.


Joe








Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on 01/20/2001
01:04:43 AM

Please respond to American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>

Sent by:  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>


To:   ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
cc:
Subject:  cross-posting


I almost hate to do this on an otherwise relaxing weekend, but (from
Linguist List)...

Date:  Thu, 18 Jan 2001 17:09:04 EST
From:  Vocabula at aol.com
Subject:  New Article: Grammar and Disputation

Hello

The January issue of "The Vocabula Review" contains an article that might
be
of interest to some of you: "Grammar and Disputation --  A Summary of
Methods
and Arguments from Ten Grammatical Errors in the American Heritage
Dictionary"

Here's the link if you want to take a look:

http://www.vocabula.com/VRJan01Corey.htm

Regards,

Robert Hartwell Fiske

The Vocabula Review
www.vocabula.com/vocabulareview.htm
===================

-larry

(I expect Geoff Nunberg, the primary trashee, has already seen this
via Linguist, but I suppose Steve K. and Joe P. should see what
(else) they're up against.)