A University standard essay on Prescriptivism.
Thursday 27 January 2011
Wednesday 12 January 2011
Work for Thursday 13th Jan for Year 13 Language
We will be moving on to the next topic soon: Prescriptivism (Issues around the use of Standard English). Do the following tasks for next week to get a head start...
Read the Wikipedia page on Linguistic Prescriptivism and make notes.
Then, look at the following quotes from ch 9 of Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue and answer the following questions. Write a paragraph on each and use any other info you can find.
1)Why is it absurd to base English grammar on Latin?
2)Explain the problem with ending a sentence with a preposition and splitting the infinitive.
3)What is the difference between a prescriptive or descriptive approach to language?
• Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g. see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). [...] According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every secondary school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't", we are clearly using the present tense drive in the past tense sense. Equally if we say, "I will drive you to work tomorrow", we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, "I would drive if I could afford to", we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form for drive is, yes, the present sense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participal form driving. We don't say, "I drive the car now", but rather, "I'm driving the car now". Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.
[p. 125]
________________________________________
• English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminologies are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. [...] Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in The English Language, one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it necessary to devote 200 pages to discussing just one aspect of the present participle. That is as crazy as it is amazing.
[p. 128]
________________________________________
• Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of the stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's more treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two objects", but rather, "the heavier", the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can only apply to two things and among to more than two.
[p. 132-133]
________________________________________
• Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds off today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer -- surprise, surprise -- is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?" -- merely a contraction of the same words -- is perfect English. [...] There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar They are because they are.
Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of a split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive:
1. Because you feel the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.
[p. 135]
________________________________________
• A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is used without taking a position). [...] The American Heritage Dictionary, first published in 1969, instituted a panel of distinguished commentators to rule on contentious points of usage, which are discussed, often at some length, in the text. But others have been more equivocal (or prudent or spineless depending on how you view it). The revised Random House Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1987, accepts the looser meanings of most words, though often noting that the newer usage is frowned on "by many" -- a curiously timid approach that acknowledges the existence of expert opinion and yet constantly places it at a distance. [...] It even accepts kudo as a singular -- prompting a reviewer from Time magazine to ask if one instance of pathos should now be a patho.
It's a fine issue. One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.
But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change -- at least slapdash change. [...] clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others. As John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.
Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian, Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarians work is never done when he gazed at those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used."
[p. 136-137]
________________________________________
Read the Wikipedia page on Linguistic Prescriptivism and make notes.
Then, look at the following quotes from ch 9 of Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue and answer the following questions. Write a paragraph on each and use any other info you can find.
1)Why is it absurd to base English grammar on Latin?
2)Explain the problem with ending a sentence with a preposition and splitting the infinitive.
3)What is the difference between a prescriptive or descriptive approach to language?
• Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g. see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). [...] According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every secondary school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't", we are clearly using the present tense drive in the past tense sense. Equally if we say, "I will drive you to work tomorrow", we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, "I would drive if I could afford to", we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form for drive is, yes, the present sense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participal form driving. We don't say, "I drive the car now", but rather, "I'm driving the car now". Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.
[p. 125]
________________________________________
• English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminologies are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. [...] Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in The English Language, one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it necessary to devote 200 pages to discussing just one aspect of the present participle. That is as crazy as it is amazing.
[p. 128]
________________________________________
• Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of the stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's more treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two objects", but rather, "the heavier", the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can only apply to two things and among to more than two.
[p. 132-133]
________________________________________
• Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds off today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer -- surprise, surprise -- is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?" -- merely a contraction of the same words -- is perfect English. [...] There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar They are because they are.
Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of a split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive:
1. Because you feel the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.
[p. 135]
________________________________________
• A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is used without taking a position). [...] The American Heritage Dictionary, first published in 1969, instituted a panel of distinguished commentators to rule on contentious points of usage, which are discussed, often at some length, in the text. But others have been more equivocal (or prudent or spineless depending on how you view it). The revised Random House Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1987, accepts the looser meanings of most words, though often noting that the newer usage is frowned on "by many" -- a curiously timid approach that acknowledges the existence of expert opinion and yet constantly places it at a distance. [...] It even accepts kudo as a singular -- prompting a reviewer from Time magazine to ask if one instance of pathos should now be a patho.
It's a fine issue. One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.
But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change -- at least slapdash change. [...] clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others. As John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.
Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian, Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarians work is never done when he gazed at those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used."
[p. 136-137]
________________________________________
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