I think the focus on “new meanings” and the constant refrain of “all languages evolve” is somewhat deceptive. I couldn’t honestly say how long “literally” has been used this way, but it’s simply a non-literal usage of the word. The extension of the word “literally” to a simple intensifier strikes me, at least, as a very natural usage. I wouldn’t be shocked if the word has actually been in use this way nearly since it entered common usage (whenever it did so).
Many of the usages that are commonly believed to be innovations are not - “ax” for “ask” has been around for about a thousand years. Chaucer used the two interchangeably. There’s a sort of perception that language was at some point pure until all sorts of “bad usages” crept in, but that’s not really how it usually works.
Joe did not make a mistake - he simply used an alternate meaning of the word “literally”. Using a word for something other than a strict denotative meaning is not a “mistake” - in some cases, the speaker might do it unthinkingly, without being aware that this usage of “literally” is frequently condemned (even if the speaker is quite able to apply both usages of the word). But the fact that someone unconsciously used a word doesn’t mean he did so mistakenly. The focus on “correct” and “mistaken” usages is simply a poor way to try to understand how people actually use language.
I thought I had made my point. Did you not understand me? What could possibly have gone wrong here? Are we not both speaking English? How can it be that I, a native speaker of English, can speak in my native tongue and it be indecipherable to you? This is a serious question. Clearly the problem is not with my grammar, n’est-ce pas?
Now you’re getting it! It’s perfectly possible to follow the rules of standard English and still not communicate one’s meanings. Fellow kin write sumpn that ain’t got no Standard english rules 'tall, 'n still git the meanin across.
It’s far more useful, in my opinion, to do the latter than the former; but neither is right or wrong according to any objective standard. Best of all is to write in either transparent or beautiful prose; and transparent prose, among other traits, generally does not violate any conventions that the reader expects to be followed. It keeps the salad fork on the right.
Yes, but I’ve already stated that I am not a prescriptivist. I just don’t go to your extreme. Fallacy of excluded middle.
Oh, hours and hours of listening to taped conversations. Wow, time well spent I’d say. :rolleyes: Research indeed.
Cite?
Oo, The theory of relativity. Nice, now care to explain what it has to do with language? Or are you saying language evolves as you approach the speed of light?
Well, soft sciences has a distinct meaning, oh wait, you don’t buy into that stuff. Yeah, soft sciences to ME means a bunch of monkeys flinging poo. :rolleyes:
No, damn those people that can only be intellectual in fields that are too abstract for people to realise they really aren’t.
Excluded middle again. Wow, you like that one. Flexible thinking isn’t throwing out all the rules and saying words can be used how they like.
Of course there isn’t aboslute direction. There isn’t abosolute language, but that doesn’t mean languages don’t have a necessary structure, which changes over time, but doesn’t do any good to change from second to second, user to user.
Considering that quantum physics has real world applications that impact my life directly, and your theory only makes everything murky and uncertain, I’d put my money on the “craziness” of it rather than you. And so far, all I see is three people on a messageboard supporting it. You SEEM sane normally, but so do most serial killers.
Your ideas, however, are just plain silly. Hours of research and years of study aside. Initially they are not, of course, but you are likely the Hovind of the linguistic community for all I know.
Um, Daniel, the salad fork actually belongs on the left, with the other forks.
Assuming that that’s what you meant to say—i.e., to use a metaphor implying that it can be useful to follow grammatical conventions, because they make it easier for the reader to understand the meaning—then I think we have common ground here.
I’ll also repeat my earlier point, unaddressed so far, about grammatical prescriptivism helping to preserve continuity in written language. I think that’s a useful function, so I disagree with Grelby’s assertion that prescriptivism doesn’t accomplish anything.
Agreed. However, the idea that language users must always refrain from prescribing grammatical rules is also stupid.
Language is not just an observed natural phenomenon that linguists study objectively. It’s also a conscious collaborative social enterprise, and an individual art, which we can choose to modify in various ways either collectively or individually. We should be able to offer our input about details of what we think our linguistic norms should be, without having horrified linguists always squawking at us that language is a natural phenomenon and we mustn’t try to prescribe rules for it.
That’s like a geologist yelling at a Stone Age craftsman that it’s presumptuous and formalist to try to chip an axe blade out of a stone that’s naturally round. Horsepucky. We use language consciously as a tool, in addition to speaking it “naturally” in the linguists’ sense. We have the right to deliberately change our usage or resist changing it, as it suits our purposes.
So if linguists want to point out that using “literally” to mean “figuratively” is not actually wrong by linguistics standards, because it simply follows a natural linguistic tendency to transform a restrictive meaning into a generally intensifying one or whatever, that’s fine by me. Let the geologist study the round rock in its natural state. But I, the lay tool-user of language and heir to generations of other prescriptivist tool-users, am nonetheless going to continue to try to shape the axe blade the way I think it works best.
I don’t want to get too far into this whole discussion, but you totally lost me here. If I’m reading this analogy correctly, you’re saying the geologist telling the caveman that it’s wrong to make a tool out of a round stone is akin to a linguist saying (to pick a well known prescriptive rule out of the air) that it’s wrong to end a sentence in a preposition? I don’t know much about geology, but I’m inferring from the example that chipping an axe out of a round stone is a “bad” thing. If that’s the case, I would think it’s the prescriptivist who’d have a bug up his ass about it, not the descriptivist. A descriptivist would look at the tool, see if it gets the job done, and if it does, hey. New shape for an axe blade.
In my view, you’re perfectly welcome to talk as you see fit, omitting or including rules as you wish. As long as you’re able to be understood by the person you’re speaking to, great. If you’re talking to friends who understand that you use literally as an intensifier, you’re breaking no rules by using it that way. If you’re talking to an incredible pedant who’s so uptight that he absolutely cannot understand you unless you use literally in its “correct” way , then you are breaking the primary rule that communication must occur, and you need to change your idiolect accordingly.
(I make a huge difference between how someone should speak and how someone should write, personally. I’m pretty well descriptivist when it comes to speech, because that’s a naturally occurring phenomenon. Writing is a whole 'nother story. Writing is an artificial tool that has set rules and guidelines, because thee written word does not have the advantages of speech modulation and context in the way speech does. A sentence that seems completely and utterly ambiguous written down becomes perfectly understandable when spoken.)
Either you describe language as it is, or as you want it to be. Please show me the subtly shaded middle value?
Ignorance on parade! Why oh why would a linguist spend thousands of hours listenting to grammatical/syntatical patterns in speech? Durrrrrr, no reason.
Ah, I thought so. You’re don’t know how linguistics is actually used, but you’re flapping your gums mightily. How very droll. Just so you’re not totally ignorant, here’s a very basic overview. But, honestly, this level of ignorance is shocking. Just how do you think a computer can understand a language without being able to parse it, analyze it for ambiguity, deal with different variations in speech patterns, etc? Magic?
:rolleyes:
Seems you’re a bit fuzzy about some of what relativity says, too. Relativity, to a degree, deals with different inertial systems, and their perspectives are all equally valid. Linguistics deals with different languages and dialects, and their perspectives are all equally valid. Just like you can’t say which of two points is ‘really’ moving and which is ‘really’ stationary, you can’t say which grammar is ‘really correct’ and which is ‘realy incorrect.’
You talk about linguistics being a ‘soft science’, but you have to ignore how they conduct research. Further, you just handwaved away the thousands of hours of transcribing and analyzing data taken from informants. You don’t get much more quantatitive than that. So even by your own definition, you’re just being a inflamatory.
Oh, and, by the way, I never said I don’t believe words have denotations, we’ve been talking about changing connotations.
(Is the amgibuity inherent in this sentence funny to anybody else?)
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Too abstract? Remember, you’ve just handwaved away the thousands of hours of dealing with informants’ data. That’s very concrete. How do you realize something ‘really’ isn’t abstract? An abstraction is simply a generalization removed one level from the primary data. “Things at rest tend to stay at rest, things at motion tend to stay at motion.” is an abstraction. Moreoever, saying that all native speakers obey an internally consistent set of rules which may contradict another native speaker’s dialect’s rules is a perfectly valid abstraction. So far your entire argument has rested on hyperbole and ad hominem. Got any factual challenges?
And you’re wrong. Again. And using a strawman. Again. And by the way, if you don’t understand that the same words can have different meanings in different jargons… ~shrugs~
Wow… you seem very confused. Of course language has a necessary structure… but if you honestly think we’re capable of ever changing it, you’re coming from the lunatic fringe. Chomsky et al. have pretty much shown that language is an inherent human function constrained by the same paramaters no matter what language you use.
You’re also confusing pragmatics with reality. Changing factors from user to user, (or dialect to dialect) doesn’t have to do any ‘good’, it’s just what is. You want conformity in language, but it will never happen. Not ever.
It’s like looking at evolution and saying “Life has a necessary structure, but doesn’t do any good to change from genepool to genepool, genome to genome.”
Mmmm hmmmm. Those computers that rely on linguists to program them with language? They, um… they’re crazy! Crazy!!!
Oh, and, as for ‘murky and uncertain’?
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Further, quantum mechanics ‘sounds just a crazy’ as linguistics. You’re just not ignorant of the applications that physics has, so you ignore that ‘crazyness’. How on earth you can think that particle/wave duality isn’t murkey while simply saying that native speakers use internally consistent structures is beyond the pale… well, it’s just somewhat nutty.
Oh, you know those of us who study linguistics, crazy as serial killers, the lot of us.
SHow me a child who does this on his own and I might begin to see your point. To state that all normal children develop language leaves out a very important step; to wit, they are taught that language. And they are *corrected * when they make mistakes.
The language was there before the children were. It does not spring from their minds. Or would Pinker have it that childen raised in isolation from speakers of a language suddenly begin to speak it?
Well… any child, really. They go through stages, babbling, etc… I’ll try to find a cite for that. The Language Instinct goes into it in some detail, IIRC. I believe Pinker was the first to say that a three year old is a “grammatical genius”, but I’m not totally sure on that fact.
No, they are not taught the language, or at least, they don’t have to be taught the language. Sit a baby down with a steady (or somewhat steady) input of language that they can hear, and they’ll begin learning it all on their own. It’s biological, and there’s really no choice about it for the kids. A ‘normal’ child could no more avoid learning language than they could avoid breathing.
And the phase of trial and error during which verb forms are invented (and such) is perfectly natural. Once the basic biological constraints have taken hold, the child will then begin to whittle down their understanding and hone it.
Yes and no… there were certain trends and patterns in language usage before the child was born, there will be different trends and patterns in the child’s own speech and that of the world around him, and there will be further changes once he’s dead.
Of course not. Studies with feral children have actually shown that after the first few years of life, key faculties in neural structure are simply gone. That’s part of the reason why younger children have a much easier time learning second languages, they’re literally built to do so.
On babbling and children learning language on their own: children with parents who use sign language will begin babbling in sign language, and correcting their usage over time as they see what their parents do with their hands.
Almost, but not quite. Children do pick up the language from their environment, but they do so completely on their own. A child does not have to be told “The subject comes before the predicate,” they will work out that that and other valid sentence structures are viable in their language. In fact, overtly correcting a child does not always work. In The Language Instinct, there is a short dialogue between a linguist and his daughter that runs something like this:
Daughter: Pass me other one spoon, please.
Father: You mean “the other spoon”.
Daughter: Yes, other one spoon.
Father: Say “the other spoon”.
Daughter: The…other…spoon. Now pass me other one spoon, please.
Now, of course she’s not going to talk like that when she becomes an adult, will she? Children go through a period where they pick up odd little quirks, but they discard them once their brain realizes it’s not proper English. They don’t learn this in the classroom; I dare say by the time a child has to sit through a Grammar course, they’ve already learned how to speak perfectly in the language(s) they grew up with, and the rest is a matter of vocabulary.
Grammar courses are useful for teaching children registers and that there is a proper way to speak in a certain context, but they already know how to speak fluently. Just because they may not be speaking what you want them to speak doesn’t make that less so.
Oh, and, before you display your ignorance yet again cricetus, you might want to read up on the innate neurological factors which enable language learning as well as the evolutionary pressures which created them.
Right. They will learn it. They will not develop it. The language was already there. They do not develop a language. If I learn from a carpenter by watching him and doing as he does, I have not developed carpentry. I have been taught carpentry. Not pedantically, perhaps, but taught nonetheless.
Yes and no. The important ‘grammatical rules’ are learned without any explicit teaching, at all. There are corrections to be made, of course “No no honey, it’s knew, not knowed.” but that’s more a question of vocab than grammar/syntax.
I’ll see if I can’t find more material for you on the 'net. Childhood linguistic development is a farily large field, all in all… but now that I’m no longer in school I don’t have access to their journal subscriptions. Definitely makes doing research more difficult. Le sigh.
True, I suppose develop in that case would mean 'develop their inherent ability to use a language." But, children can and do develop their own languages. Siblings, especially, have been known to create ‘play languages’ with their own vocabulary, syntax, grammar, etc… in order not to be understood by the grownups.
Perhaps we’ll have to disagree on that point. You’ve learned it via observation, but you’ve not been taught it. There is a difference, as the function for understanding was inborn in you and not drilled into you by the carpenter.
But, if you’re using ‘taught’ to refer to someone providing, for lack of a better term, an object lesson, then yes, language can’t be learned in a void. (Although to be fair, I never studied feral children in great detail. It’s possible that I’m missing something here.)
, then you are breaking the primary rule that communication must occur, and you need to change your idiolect accordingly.