Prescriptive linguists

[Tom Zurinskas]

Very deconstructive indeed.  I, of course, dissagree, but I'm open to any examples.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at authorhouse.com.



> Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:50:39 -0800
> From: wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
> Subject: Re: Prescriptive linguists
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: Prescriptive linguists
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Allow me to deconstruct the situation as helpfully as I can.
>
> See, _no_ native speaker intuition is admissible because we don't know if some other native speaker somewhere would strongly disagree. In principle, we don't even have to find s/him.
>
> And remember that a "fact" is, for advanced thinkers, just another word for "somebody's probably erroneous opinion."
>
> Party on!
>
> JL
>
> Geoff Nathan  wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Geoff Nathan
> Subject: Prescriptive linguists
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> David Bowie wrote:
>> It's actually a semi-long story with lots of background, but it
>> culminated in me being told that i wasn't allowed to give any more
>> native speaker judgments on English grammar in a syntax class, since I
>> was clearly unable to give correct native speaker judgments properly.
>>
>> (There were lots of things that led up to it, but the straw that broke
>> the camel's back was, IIRC, my acceptance of "for to" as a complementizer.)
>>
>> The kicker? It was a non-native speaker of English who put me under that
>> ban.
> Many years ago I was teaching intro. to generative syntax (back about
> the Revised Extended Standard Theory time) and a fairly well-known
> American Structuralist was sitting in on the class ("to keep up with the
> field"). He announced that Chomsky was not actually a native speaker of
> English, so his grammaticality judgments could not be taken seriously.
> When I expressed some surprise at this statement, I was informed that
> Chomsky had spent too much time in the immigrant community growing up,
> and was therefore not exposed to the full range of American English
> constructions. I took this at the time as a kind of covert
> antisemitism, and I still think I was right.
> Somewhat later in the course Radford (the author of the textbook) used
> the following ungrammatical sentence to illustrate what we now call
> long-distance dependencies:
>
> *Which car did you put Mary in the garage?
>
> My structuralist friend used this as an example of what he was talking
> about--for him this was perfectly grammatical. Since I found it
> incomprehensible I challenged him on it. Turns out he could use ethical
> datives in places I couldn't. He was from a small town in Kentucky, FWIW.
> I should have also pointed out that (to the best of my knowledge--I
> haven't met him) Radford IS a native speaker.
>
> --
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
>
> Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology,
> and Associate Professor of English, Linguistics Program
> Phone Numbers (313) 577-1259 or (313) 577-8621
> Wayne State University
> Detroit, MI, 48202
>
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