For example: “I’m doing good” vs. “I’m doing well.”
Is the former grammatically incorrect for a ‘scientific’ reason, or is it so because that’s just the way ‘tradition’ has it and that’s the way things are (that is, it is against rules that were established and/or evolved over time)? And if it’s the latter, who established those rules and when? And why? When did the ‘correct’ grammar we use come about?
Depends on whether you’re a prescriptionist or a descriptionist.
The former believes there are hard and set rules (usually justified by the prescrptionist) that make it correct or not.
A descrptionist says “that;s how people say it, so it’s corredt.”
Several different things are being mixed in your question.
Let’s start with the way formalists look at good and well:
Grammar is often - well, almost universally - misused in questions like these. Formally, grammar is concerned with the underlying structure of a language. In standard English grammar, the sentence “I do well not today feel” is an impossibility for a native speaker, even though its meaning could be figured out. There are other languages in which the word order could legitimately be mixed that way; i.e. have a different grammar.
In school, grammar is extended to a series of statements about structuring sentences. Nouns and verbs should agree with one another: the boy is, the boys are. The major parts of speech include adjectives and adverbs: adjectives modify nouns, adverbs everything else. A great many of these structural statements can be made. Language is slippery and trickery and it’s very much easier for a teacher to lay out “rules” which all, or almost all, formalists agree upon and tell students to do them or else. You can’t really get into trouble that way and the subtler nuances of the language are lost on most non-adults in the first place.
The problem lies in the fact that the spoken language is not the written language. Spoken language is much less formal and uses forms that the formal written language doesn’t accept - until, perhaps with time, they do become acceptable. This is usage, not grammar, though in real life they overlap all the time.
The very short, glib, version of history is that a lot of supposed scholars - pedants - in the 19th century disliked the way that casual speech was affecting formal writing. They looked back to languages like Latin, whose grammar imposes more defined structure than English does. They created a long, long set of rules to follow. When teaching became a mass profession, teachers themselves were taught to teach from these rulebooks to be considered knowledgeable. From today’s perspective, the 19th century pedants knew very little about language, as little as doctors then knew about medicine. Why not end sentences with prepositions? Why not split infinitives? Why not do a thousand things in real life, not formal, writing? But the rules served as a good marker for class structure and hidden biases against those who couldn’t, or didn’t, follow them.
The last hundred years have been a period of loosening of these rules and allowing more casual and colloquial usages into good writing. The big change came in the 1960s, when linguists and lexicographers finally broke through and proved academically that the things the formalists were saying about language were often wrongheaded and ahistorical.
What levels of language are allowable and how people should be judged by the language they use has become a popular sport since the rise of the Internet and the expansion of the percentage of the population whose written words you see on a regular basis from about 5% of the population to about 95% of the population. No authorities exist to regulate 95% of the population. Changes in acceptability are inevitable. That is not the same thing as saying that anything goes. If you don’t communicate your message, or require people to spend too much effort to figure out what you say, then quibbles over prepositions aren’t the issue.
To sum up: the “rules” have changed because they never should have been rules in the first place. That’s why nothing has taken their place except common sense.
If you get too far ahead of acceptable usage, you run the risk of appearing uneducated or even stupid. Grammar changes slowly so things that were beyond the pale when I was at school, like splitting an infinitive, are now normal, even though they often sound odd and clumsy to my ears.
There is also a big difference between casual and formal language. Things you would happily write on a forum post or in a letter to a friend, are quite likely to be out of place in, say, a résumé.
For example, in a post it would A-OK to spell it resume. But on a résumé you better include those damn accents.
And that;s how people pundtuatedt and spelledt it, so it;s corredt.
Never confuse actually corredt with your phone;s spellchecker"s version of corredt.
Or the problem is that written language is not spoken language. Speech is what humans naturally do, without being taught. Fundamentally language is speech first. Writing is an artifice–it isn’t natural. It’s something that humans do at times to represent speech, but at other times for other very different purposes (or a combination of the two). It’s highly conventionalized and subject to much more arbitrary and context-specific coding.
All too often–especially on this board–there’s an underlying tendency to assume that language somehow begins as writing. It becomes clear when people says things like, “The E is silent,” as though writing is what drives speech, when the fact is that ALL letters are silent–ink and pixels don’t make sounds, the human mouth and tongue make sounds. Unless they’re affecting their speech, people by and large talk the way they do regardless of print. Except for cases of ELLs, or children, to say a person’s speech is “wrong” is usually like saying a flower is the “wrong” color. You can say it’s non-standard, or dialect, or affected, etc., but to say it’s “wrong” just because of some kind of rule that comes from writing pedagogy is putting the cart before the horse.
There is such a thing as a grammar error, even if you’re a descriptivist. It’s very simple: if the meaning is unclear or ambiguous, it’s an error (unless you’re doing it deliberately). Whether it’s ambiguous depends on the context, however. “I’m doing good” might be perfectly understandable in some contexts. But in others, the reader/listener might not know whether you’re doing well or doing the opposite of evil. It would be an error in those cases where you’re trying to communicate something and fail.
Errors always introduce either incomprehension or ambiguity. When the subject-verb agreement is bad, for another example, you might not know which one is the error, and the sentence could mean two different things, depending on where the error is. Was the subject supposed to be plural? Or was the verb conjugated wrong? If the answer is not clear, that’s when you’ve got a true error. But if your audience understands without any trouble, you can break any rule you want and not do anything wrong.
Language can be unclear or ambiguous without being ungrammatical. It happens all the time. In fact, that is precisely the condition for the vast majority of traditional one-liner jokes:
I once shot an elephant in my pajamas.
There’s nothing ungrammatical about this famous line of Groucho Marx, but the ambiguity allows him to continue by saying: “How he got in there I’ll never know!”
On the other hand, ungrammatical language doesn’t necessarily lead to incomprehension. People occasionally say ungrammatical things in the same way that people occasionally stumble or drop something. It’s usually perceived as ungrammatical by interlocutors, and the speaker will often correct him- or herself–(in discourse analysis known as self-repair):
[QUOTE=Tony Blair on CNN, 12-08-2008]
Well, I think it’s–you know, I think this has gone beyond, as it were, Al Qaida as a specific network. I mean, this is–there is no central command in this ideology, the way that, you know, you would normally describe one unit of–that leads an operation. It’s not like that.
[/quote]
What makes something ungrammatical are the standards of the particular discourse community, not comprehensibility. If Blair hadn’t corrected himself in this case, for example, I don’t think his point would have been unclear, though he might have been seen as poorly spoken.
Language is a code that helps us convey our thoughts to other people. In order for people to understand those thoughts, both the sender and the recipients of the message have to agree on the rules for that code. Those rules include word meaning and grammar. That’s why we have to have rules of grammar. Otherwise, language is meaningless. The problem is determining which rules to follow, those society have adopted by their use in spoken language, or those developed (sometimes arbitrarily) by some 19th century pedantic egg-heads who liked to show off their knowledge of classical and continental languages. One way to resolve this difference is to accept degrees of formality: some speech patterns are perfectly acceptable when talking with your friends, but would not get you a job if wrote your résumé that way. The most formal would be for a job interview or thesis, the least formal between married couples or twins.
That is a *very *interesting point. At once blindingly obvious and simultaneously not something I’d ever thought about. Thank you.
To be sure, the fact we SDMBers are all “conversing” using writing reinforces the writing-first POV here. As does typical schooling; the “three Rs” don’t include a T for talking.
Piggy-backing on the last couple posts about ambiguity …
Setting aside humor, in general ambiguity is a sign of poor communication. IMO it’s the worst sin of communication, and all the worse because it’s almost completely avoidable with some care on the part of the speaker.
When speaking a conversation, I’m talking to a restricted audience and I have a pretty good idea of their degree of attention and their context. I’m often speaking to someone I know well. Even if not, it’s likely we’re from the same region and social class, or if we’re not, I’m aware of our differences, as is whoever I’m speaking with.
Written communication is fundamentally different in that I often don’t know who I’m communicating with, I don’t know their context, etc. As such I have to work harder to achieve the same lack of ambiguity.
Formal rules help to reduce the size of the error circle; the size of the difference between my choices of word selection and word order versus an arbitrary audience member’s interpretation of same.
So despite the whinging that grammar rules are mere 19th Century Pedantry, archaic formalisms from a painfully Formal Age, they in fact become all the more important as the circle of our audience widens.
With this post I’m now conversing with Americans of all races, regions, and social classes. Plus Aussies, Brits, Irish, Spaniards, Dutch and gosh knows who else. In another 40 years the number of Asians and Chinese communicating in English via internet will skyrocket. If we hope to communicate well, it will require good rules well-adhered to.
Note I am not defending the specifics of those 19th Century pedants. Merely asserting that rules, formal or informal, will be needed to keep ambiguity and outright failure to communicate to a tolerable level.
it may still have meaning.
I say “context is everything” a lot, and I get to say it again here.
The context of this thread is written language, not spoken language. People who are illiterate can master the spoken language. Only the written language is taught in schools and is given a list of rules as well as dos and don’ts. Any discussion of language rules is in a context of the written language; native speakers almost always speak gramatically after a short period in childhood where they extrapolate words logically and fail to account for language’s irrationality: I goed to the store.
We each have four separate vocabularies: writing, reading, speaking, and listening. Context is critical in these as well. Words that are half-forgotten can be brought to life by the context they are in. Use of slang can be informed by either surrounding words or tone. You usually don’t need to know every single word you are reading or listening to to get the meaning of the entire passage. Signs use this context all the time. The classic “funny” sign SLOW CHILDREN elides a much longer sentence, “slow your vehicle because of the potential danger of children being in the road” without sacrificing meaning (at least to a skilled speaker).
As long as meaning is agreed upon by a group in the group’s context, you can have regionalisms, slang, argot, cant, creoles, pidgins or other non-standard forms of language. Each has grammar - the latent structure that speakers agree upon - and therefore rules that can’t be broken, but those may differ from the rules of standard, formal written language.
So I disagree with guizot. We are discussing written language in this thread, and written language is a thing unto itself, a context that is distinct from spoken language even if they at times overlap.
You are right to point this out. I was overconcise before; what I should have explained more explicitly was that the ambiguity test applies when there is a possible or perceived grammar error, which in Groucho’s quote there isn’t. Such ambiguity is bad writing if you’re trying to get a point across (or brilliant if you’re making a joke), but not ungrammatical. Point being, there are other errors besides grammatical ones that introduce some degree of ambiguity or outright confusion.
Having said that, I think what I stated originally still holds and answers the OP’s question, because it was a case of knowing there might be a grammar error, and deciding whether the construction is really ungrammatical.
If instead the question is, “I have an error. Is it grammatical or something else?”, well, that’s a different question. Then we get into the definition of grammar and perhaps a discussion of other types of errors. I don’t think that was the OP’s intent. (But no doubt it would make for a good discussion.)
“I’m doing good” is grammatically correct, but it means something different from “I’m doing well.” “To do good” means to perform good deeds. There’s an old joke about the New England missionaries: they came to do good, and they did quite well.
To a descriptivist, a sentence is grammatical if it sounds right to a native speaker. One problem with this is that native speakers often disagree about what sounds right. To some native English speakers, “The car runs good” sounds fine. To others it sounds wrong. Because of this, descriptivists tend to see the rules of grammar as being flexible and dependent on context.
jepflast:
“Such ambiguity is bad writing if you’re trying to get a point across (or brilliant if you’re making a joke), but not ungrammatical.”
Groucho again:
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
If you are volunteering at hospices, cleaning bed pans and helping stray dogs at the SPCA, you are “doing good”.
My favorite intentionally ambiguous Groucho line:
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
So a poster ad I saw for a hand sanitizer read: “The amount of germs on your phone will have you saying omg”. The basic problem here is that “amount” is uncountable whereas “number” is countable, ie “a huge amount of money” and “a large number of coins”. Further on countable and uncountable words might include “I drank so much beer” vs “I drank so many beers”.