summary of conditions (was Re: PSAT Glitch)

[Dennis R. Preston]

I wonder if American Speech, the long arm of the ADS (read by many
whose linguistics background is not as heavy as NLLT readers), might
consider this worthy (and might provider a broader outreach for these
truths, which are to us so obvious but which have not penetrated even
the well-read, well-educated surrounding community).

dInIs





dInIs sez to me:
  >If you publish this exposÈ, we will all be even more grateful to
  >you for your hard work in exposing the well-known (among linguists)
  >soft underbelly of pre- (and primarily pro-) scriptivism.

i'm workin' on it, though i still have a few more topics to write
about.  goodness knows where i could get it published, though, other
than the Topic...Comment section of the journal Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory.  that would be a service to the profession, i
guess, but i'd hope to reach a wider, or at least different, audience.

as a step in that direction, i'll be writing a letter to my colleague
(formerly at ohio state, now at stanford) andrea lunsford about
the Possessive Antecedent Proscription.  lunsford/collins, The
New St. Martin's Handbook (1999), turns out to be one of the offending
handbooks.  i'll post a copy of the letter here.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

--
Dennis R. Preston
Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic,
      Asian & African Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027
e-mail: preston at msu.edu
phone: (517) 353-9290