[Corpora-List] Google searches as linguistic evidence

[Geoffrey Sampson]

An amazing experience I had a few years ago was being asked in all
seriousness by one of my part-time researchers whether "a bad egg" or
"an bad egg" was correct.  With another part of his time he worked for a
company alongside another man who had to do some documentation and
insisted that the correct form was "an bad egg".  So far as I could make
out, this other man (who, like my researcher, was as I understood it a
native speaker) thought he had learned a rule that "a" v. "an" depends
on whether the following noun begins with a vowel, and this explicit
rule overrode in his mind what must surely have been a large weight of
experience implying that it is not the following noun, but the
immediately-following word, that matters.  The third party was quite
sure that only "an bad egg" would do in writing; my researcher was
dubious, but felt he needed my professorial authority to contradict his
colleague.  This seemed to me very striking counter-evidence against the
idea that native speakers "know" the rules of their language.
Comparable misunderstandings of the a/an rule might perhaps explain
sporadic cases of "an w..." written by people who would surely _say_ "a
w..." when they were speaking spontaneously, without thinking about
language issues.

Geoffrey Sampson

 
............................................................
     Prof. Geoffrey Sampson  MA PhD MBCS CITP ILTM

     author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"

     Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
     Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England

     www.grsampson.net     +44 1273 678525
............................................................