You claim to disagree, but your subsequent two sentences appear to support exactly what I said.
Let’s just add an important piece of information to this - languages “invent” themselves. So now you’ve moved off your dubious claim that could have is better than could of in any absolute sense?
We need to clarify this as the formal register in some dialects of the actual English language as presently constituted. If you don’t dispute that modification (and it’s easy to show that you’d be objectively wrong to do so), it seems to me that you’re now agreeing that in correcting “could of” all we’re doing it is imposing conformity with the arbitrary conventions of the formal register of a specific dialect - the one with the army and the navy.
Given that insight, do you have anything to say on the question of why you are so aggressive about denouncing this usage, and many other usages that do nothing worse than violate the entirely arbitrary conventions of your preferred dialect?
Not at all. I think you do an excellent job of getting them to start thinking about the nature of differences, and what we are really doing when we follow conventional rules. Many people don’t seem to have good intuition for when things are arbitrary - that there are good reasons for both “don’t steal things” and “drive on the right”, but in the latter case it’s just because it’s sometimes best that we all do the same thing.
And the telepathy intro is a nice hook. Language really does do exactly what people think of in the sci-fi form of telepathy, we just take it for granted because we’re familiar with it and it uses known physics.
To back up to the matter of substance, I gave a speculative analysis of why I thought writers using the “should have …” form would be more likely to use the appropriate past participle, even if they couldn’t articulate the formal reason for it, because they probably had a better sense of language and its patterns.
No, I have no solid evidence for it, beyond the anecdotal evidence of having often seen it happen, and the Google results which I can’t assume are definitive because I don’t know how many of those occurrences are in the wild and how many are in the context of grammar discussions. But I have every reason to believe that “should of went” is very common, and “should have went” not so much.
Yeah, because what you regard as “conformity with the arbitrary conventions of the formal register of a specific dialect” also has another name: it’s called “the English language”. It’s defined in the world’s principal English dictionaries, basic manuals of grammar, and at a more nuanced and stylistic level, in various style guides. It’s what we learn in schools, it’s what we teach our children, it’s how we communicate as adults. That this language is in constant flux over the long term is irrelevant to this fundamental proposition. That many different dialects spin off from it is also irrelevant to this proposition. I do not concede that anyone who manages only to get their subjects, verbs, and objects in the right order is necessarily speaking meaningful English or communicating effectively.
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Perhaps. And perhaps a few other times? Likely I’d wager. But boy a handful of times infrequent enough that it is that hard to find annoys you that much?
Do you really have no insight about how classist and supremacist this sounds?
I shrugged this off before as silly hyperbole, but I guess we need to come back to…
How can someone who has read Pinker and who has heard of Chomsky’s ideas be so ignorant about language? Do you really not understand that there is rich structure that makes the vast majority of combinations of words ungrammatical - and by ungrammatical I don’t mean silly trivia like “could of”, I mean mistakes that nobody ever makes? Are you seriously suggesting that my use of the common example of S-V-O word order means that’s the only rule I could come up with, and that the rich structure of language is no more fundamental than your sneering prescriptivism over minor variants? Aside from the cringeworthy supremacism that you seem completely obvious to, you’re the linguistic equivalent of a physicist obsessing that his particle accelerator was painted red when he really wanted blue, and doesn’t grasp how astonishing it is and what it can do.
That’s a great presentation! It really is. And this old curmudgeon has no issues with it.
I just don’t know why you have to apologize that “some of those slides are gonna sound prescriptivist”. FFS, it says that language has grammar rules. Which it does! It has spelling conventions. It needs punctuation, and there are rules for that. All of which are important and need to be known so that we can communicate well.
I love the bit about “Sometimes you break rules. Knowing the rules helps you break them well.” I’ve said this often, but sometimes I get accused of believing that “breaking the rules is OK only if I like it.”
You don’t have “every reason.” You’ve got one cite showing that “of went” might be more common than “of gone,” and nothing relating to “have went”–did you just introduce that latter construction? And it’s a cite that you admit might not be meaningful, and that you offered because it was easy to offer. And you’ve not answered any of the other questions, including the most important question, viz., “So what?”
Language has grammar rules, but if you’re a native speaker of a language, you don’t need to “know” them. One of the things I point out to my kids is that they use the rules without knowing them. I’ll give them an example sentence like “An chicken egg laid the,” and they’ll laugh and agree that it kind of hurts their head, and they can correct the sentence to “The chicken laid an egg,” without ever knowing about subjects, verbs, objects, tense, or determinants. Knowing the rules can help you do some fancy tricks, and it can help you learn other languages, but you don’t need to know them to communicate well: folks were communicating well long before grammarians existed.
Spelling standardization is a relative innovation in the history of language. They mostly postdate Shakespeare and other folks who “communicated well.” They might be helpful today, and they’re certainly a cultural mainstay in modern formal English, but they’re hardly a prerequisite for good communication as a general rule.
Much the same applies to punctuation.
I teach this stuff, because it’s terribly useful for working wtihin a certain arena. Similarly, if I were teaching kids to play classical violin, I’d teach them about vibrato. But that doesn’t mean I sneer at and insult the bluegrass player who never uses vibrato.
Far from “anything goes” and “arbitrary rules”, linguists do try to formulate models such as minimalist grammars, logical versus phonetic forms, and so on, in an attempt to get at and to understand the ways in which humans actually think about (process) language.
If truly universal, these properties should apply to any language.
@wolfpup: Consider a group of completely illiterate people, in the bottom quartile of the distribution of human cognitive ability. Workers with low social status in a time a place with no schooling for them, no formal education. A group are in the pub together, laughing and gossiping.
Do you imagine that their language lacks structure, or has a structure that is in some way inferior to yours? Do you think that their informal register means that they just throw together words ad libitum, and that fewer combinations of words are disallowed under their grammatical rules and social conventions? Do you think that they cannot (orally) communicate the range of ideas and subtlety of emotion that you can?
No. What I do think, however, is that there is a hierarchy of language skills in the sense that a higher skill level in the hierarchy generally and functionally incorporates the lower levels. IOW, a writer skilled in the finest nuances of formal Standard English should be able to put aside the novel he had been writing, and go down to the pub and have a good time with your hypothetical menial workers. But none of those workers would be able to reciprocate and collaborate on his actual writing. This is not about superior/inferior, and nor is it about “quality”. It’s entirely possible that these workers have developed a subculture dialect of their own, and that it’s richly expressive with a self-consistent grammar and may indeed be quite interesting and innovative. My argument is ultimately about the virtue of acquiring the most versatile literary skill set, one which subsumes the others. The same reason that @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness teaches his kids Standard English.
The objectionable problem with the “classist” argument is that it presumes the sort of bigotry that regards different levels of literacy as representative of permanently entrenched classes. They are not. Your hypothetical illiterate menial workers might be just as capable or better at the job than my hypothetical novelist or white-collar worker, given only the opportunity and the appropriate level of literacy.
Just how detached are you from reality to imagine that anyone with a completely different social background but a high level of literacy could immediately communicate fluently and comfortably in any working class dialect?
Your immediate backpedaling here is telling.
If that’s true, how do you account for the fact that most of your commentary on language is stern disparagement of “incorrect” usage? What strange definition of “versatility” is this that motivates you to be almost completely focused on a misguided attempt to purify language to your preferred standards, the rejection of diversity?
The way I like to express this is that you need to know the rules, but you don’t need to know you know them. They must have got into your brain somehow as a kid, but you don’t realize it. Most people, even well educated adults, cannot articulate the rules that they follow flawlessly in every sentence they speak.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the weird adjective order thing? Maybe it’s not a good first example, since it’s not so fundamental as the jumbled sentence you used as an illustration, but it’s a very entertaining example of what we all know but don’t know we know. And, in this case, why on earth it matters, why we all seem to agree that it’s just wrong if you violate the order. We don’t teach adjective order, except to point out errors that we cannot rationally explain to non-native speakers in ESL classes. I think it illustrates that we must have some kind of mysterious instinct to form consensus on usage in communities of speakers.
Just how detached are you from reality to imagine that I haven’t done exactly that? Not in the extreme hypothetical that you suggested, but as an academic, I’ve had many a fine pub evening with non-academics and blue-collar workers. We got along just fine. One of my best friends is a distinctly non-academic blue-collar right-wing type, but we’ve been friends since forever. I’ve mentioned him in other threads before. Hardly a fantastic claim – it’s your argument that is fantastic (not in a good way).
I don’t need to “backpedal” anything.
What I’ve been doing is supporting the position I’m trying to elucidate – that mastery of the full scope of Standard English maximizes opportunities across the whole spectrum of the language. My apparent “disparagement” is not really against those who misuse the language – although I admit that emotionally I’ve sometimes disparaged them – but my real argument is against those who excuse it and defend it to the point where they appear to be actually defending illiteracy.
I think I’ve been beaten up enough for today. Maybe we should all take a break.
This thread makes me think about arguments about cuisine, and whether there is such a thing as “objectively better” cooking. Skilled writers could be the equivalent of Michelin starred chefs, and people who use English in a non-standard way might be people who put ketchup on everything. There are a large number of people, perhaps even a majority, who might find the food from a Michelin starred restaurant completely unappealing. Still, I think it’s hard to deny the level of skill required to cook that sort of cuisine. I don’t think haute cuisine is necessarily objectively superior to, say, a burger and fries, but I think it’s fair to say that it requires objectively more skill.
People who are sticklers for grammar make me think of people who are vehemently against pineapple on pizza, or who believe that ketchup and hot dogs should never mix. Still, I can kind of get your point - saying that the English language is degrading is kind of similar to lamenting that people would rather eat at KFC or Taco Bell than eating a nice home cooked meal these days - yeah, that’s kind of classist, but I get it.