Well, alright, but Kendall Jackson’s point still stands, that even the descriptivists can and do recognize such concepts as “Standard English” and “ungrammatical”; they just ground them in actual empirical observations of the way language is actually used.
So is there something called Standard American English or Standard English by linguists? I’m just wondering, because I got into a sort of debate on this board a few years back and remember being told there’s no such thing as Standard American English, and I had a difficult time refuting that point, even though, in the end, I was on the descriptivist side of the debate.
edit:Here’s the referenced thread. (But, yes, I agree Kendall’s point still stands.)
Well, I should probably have worded that better (and if anything I say is wrong, I hope someone else will). There are various different levels at which we can speak of “Standard”; certainly, there are significant differences between what one would be inclined to call “Standard American English” and “Standard British English”, and then within those you could perhaps pull off into smaller standards as well, from which the larger ones are abstracted. They’re certainly nebulous concepts, and it would not be correct to say there’s one particular completely defined standard; rather, one can abstract the common features from a variety of manners of speaking covering a wide swath of speakers with a good base of institutional support into a description of that which is “standard”. (There is also some connection to the concept of prestige dialects and so on…)
But lest there be conflation, let it be noted that a linguist’s discussion of “Standard English” does not carry any prescription with it; he does not feel as though speakers of “non-standard” varieties are speaking incorrectly. Rather, they are just speaking differently, no silly morality attached to this fact. Ungrammaticality is always relative to the standard of one’s own speech community, and if some features common in one’s own community are less familiar more generally, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Looking through the referenced thread, my feeling is that you were basically in the right.
No. Nor do we have the equivalent of the Académie Française or the Accademia della Crusca.
The SDMB is all that stands between the polloi and linguistic chaos. In some circles it’s downright unseemly to ridicule or correct the incompetent or uneducated. Even in these ranks you might run into a ferocious defense of Ebonics–um…I mean…African American Vernacular English–for instance.
When I spoke of “Standard”, I didn’t mean “Standard as passed down from a regulatory academy”, I just meant “Standard as abstracted from the sociolinguistic facts about how people speak”.
So could someone just say that all of Spanish is a part of English and end the whole English only debate?
Well of course someone could say that.
It would not, however end the debate. Every language needs at least some prescriptivism in order for it to retain the ability to communicate, even if that prescriptivism is little more than a de facto common understanding of what a word or phrase means. The less formal prescription there is, the more rapid the evolution of a language, but at the cost of clarity.
For English and Spanish to evolve into a common language would require a lot more than declaring Spanish to be a subset.
AAVE is a perfectly grammatical dialect with its own set of logical rules. There are even certain grammatical features of AAVE that are not present in “Standard English,” (for example, AAVE has ways of indicating additional verb aspects that are not present in regular English). So while certain grammatical features of English are simplified in AAVE, certain ones are made more complex.
That said, in order to function and be successful in society at large, it is beneficial to have a grasp of the formal dialect. I would say the best communicators are able to switch between several different dialects, given the situation.
Cite?
Languages obviously have mechanisms that keep them at least partially tethered, but I think you ridiculously overestimate the value of “prescription”. Although I’m not a professional linguist, I do know a few and have conversations with 'em every once in a while. I read some linguistics books, histories of language, usage guides, and I can’t think of even a single clear cut case where prescription has slowed the change of any word or grammatical usage.
I see, in fact, the exact opposite. The very topics that become most heated among the prescriptivists are exactly those that are most irrelevant. I still hear complaints about split-infinitives (standard for centuries), prepositions at the end (standard for centuries), the “singular they” (standard for centuries), or hated new definitions of words (like “hopefully”, the newer and more useful definition of which being standard longer than I’ve been alive), and yet these complaints aren’t even accurate, let alone powerful enough to slow the change of the language. In my experience, all that they’ve slowed down is the fight against ignorance.
At the same time, something quiet that doesn’t get complained about at all, like putting the article before the noun instead of after (“the dog” instead of “dog the”) keeps on chugging along just fine even without the ire of the prescriptivists. So please, if you’re gonna believe this, give it some evidence, because my observations run entirely contrary to yours.
Sorry, but until the 70s, “his” in this context was thought to be a gender-neutral antecedent. All style and grammar guides agreed on that point. It wasn’t until the Women’s Liberation movement came into existance that anyone began to question it.
And, at the time, it was gender-neutral. No one would have thought that “every student should do his homework” referred only to males. But for political reasons, women began to object to the form (and they had a strong point), so people began thinking differently.
You’re falling into the fallacy of assuming that people always thought they way they do now.
Nowadays, but that’s a new interpretation. “Their” was used from time to time, but “his” was considered correct grammar for hundreds of years until the 1970s.
Going by Quirk and Greenbaum’s **A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English ** (and Q&G are rock hard descriptionists), the correct form here is either “their” or “his.” (Example given: “Every one/Each/Each one of the students should have their/his own books.” Section 4.92).
My copy is dated 1973, which is around the time the idea that “his” is not gender neutral began to gain wide acceptance. But at that time, note that “he or she” or “she” are not listed as an option. And this is a very liberal interpretation: any prescriptionist worth his salt back then would have said “their” is wrong, and would have thought “his or her” to be awkward.
Kendall Jackson, thanks for your response to my post. I have unpopular views on linguistic prescriptivism, and for whatever reason, people often have trouble responding without name-calling. I appreciate your cool head.
However, I still disagree. Reread the OP. He doesn’t ask what is “acceptable.” He asks what is “correct.” This, to me, implies he wants a prescriptive rule. I understand that you could interpret it differently, but grammar questions arise pretty regularly on the Dope, and it would be unsatisfying to answer them all with “It’s right if the other guy understands what you mean.”
When posters have grammar questions, I think it’s safe to assume they are looking for the pedantic, prescriptive, nit-picky answer. Why else would they ask? If the OP wanted to know whether something were grammatical in AAVE, he probably would have specified.
There is some merit to what you say here, but it’s not an argument I fully swallow. I outlined my objections previously here and here when a similar argument was once made before.
Yes, Strunk and White didn’t like the gender-neutral “they,” and Fowler thought it sounded old-fashioned. They would both have been against it.
However, given the situation and the place the sentence appears, I would argue that it is not incorrect in any sense. The teacher is not following any style guide, and the sign is not in what I would consider a formal context (like a scientific paper, law review, etc.), so therefore, I would say the usage is acceptable and correct for that context.
I agree with this:
As your teacher I will not tolerate students in this classroom doing anything that is not in their best interest or the best interest of the class.
“Their + singular” can be defended in cases where you want to exclude gender to avoid prejudice, or if it’s unknown, but neither would be the case here. Given you are speaking to a group anyway, there’s no reason you shouldn’t put the constuction in the plural form. Besides, given the nature of students anyway, it’s not uncommon for the rule breaking to be done by two or more of them 
Incidentally, the descriptivist position is not “It’s right if the other guy understands what you mean”. Rather, it’s “It’s grammatical if it’s the way people actually generally unremarkably speak”. No descriptivist is going to consider sentences like “Please, bathroom where to the can find I would like some” or “Fox the brown quick jumps over dog the lazy” to be grammatical in English, because no native English speakers actually talk like that, and all would find such expressions a bit jarring, even though you can easily figure out what they mean.
You may also find it interesting to observe that no prescriptivist usage guides ever really bother elucidating the rules of syntax which make those sentences ungrammatical, yet, all the same, people chug along just fine following those rules on their own, demonstrating just how little the role of prescriptivism is in keeping languages usable. That’s how real (spoken) language rules work; nobody has to be told about them, they just pick it up through the same overwhelming osmosis as they learn how to speak in the first place. The only “rules” people have to be told about are ones their speech community doesn’t actually follow, in which case, those rules aren’t actually applicable to their speech community in the first place.
Until the women’s liberation movement, the gender of a member of a particular group was usually obvious. For example I just looked up “Nursing” in my 1944 Encyclopedia Britannica. While the article acknowledges the existence of male nurses, it consistently uses feminine pronouns. Why doesn’t the encyclopedia use the “correct” gender-neutral forms? Maybe because they weren’t really gender-neutral even in 1944?
As long as the roles that men and women played in society were largely segregated it didn’t really matter. But if you work in an office that’s half female, sending out an email that says “Someone left his lunch in conference room!” sounds weird.
You’re right: it’s a bit disingenuous of me to characterize the descriptivist position that way.
That said, it is no more satisfying to respond to a question about the correctness of a linguistic construction with “Studies show that lots of people say it that way.”
When you ask what the speed limit is, you don’t want to hear “Everyone goes 75.” While that might be useful information, it’s not the information the questioner wants.
But rather the questioner would, most times rather tell you all available information. “The speed limit is 70, but everyone here goes 75,” while technically correct, would probably be a more helpful answer than “The speed limit is 70.”
So with many people saying “this is academically ‘official’” piping in and saying “but this has been used forever as well to great effect” (affect? One word I get confused on often, sorry) is a good addendum to the information presented. Granted it would probably be better without the arguing but…
So for you, the ideal answer would first explain the prescriptive grammar rule, perhaps explore a different prescriptive grammar rule relating to the question, and finally wrap up with a disclaimer that there is another school of thought out there that would hold the prescriptive grammar rules as void? And since this is the dope, do you think it would be appropriate to include a little gag at the end? Sound good? 