mountainhiker: If it were that simple, then all native English speakers would be highly proficient in speaking, reading, and writing. Unfortunately, they ain't. Moreover, listening is trivial. Monkey's can listen to English all day, but I am not sure you want to have a long conversation with a monkey. Corresponding with an English speaking person by talking and writing will get the synapses firing. But in order to communicate, you have to know some ground rules.

All native speakers are highly proficient in the grammar they use for their dialect, MH. You're confusing grammatical structure, which all ENLs know exceedingly well, with knowledge of vocabulary and the ability to give speeches and the ability to write, etc.

Two VERY different categories. Of course writing, reading and spelling must be taught for the very simple reason that these are NOT parts of natural language. There are millions who are illiterate, but we don't find people who are "illanguageate". Writing was consciously invented and as such, it is an 'artificial' part of language. Compare this to the spoken language which wasn't invented.

Little children, so easily baffled by so much, learn language without any formal instruction. They become highly proficient at all the structures of language. They daily deploy uses that confound language scientists in their complexity. How is this possible?

Listening is NOT trivial. It is THE most important aspect in learning language.

======================

So many here are missing the large issue. Of course we need rules; of course there ARE rules. MH, like so many others, dances around the crucial point. There are BAD rules. These are the rules that are NOT rules. They were mere concoctions.

>>>>>>>>>>

S Pinker - The Language Instinct

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.

Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.

So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.


Where did these "rules" come from? Read on.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct

The scandal of the language mavens began in the 18th Century. The London dialect had become an important world language, and scholars began to criticize it as they would any institution, in part to question the authority of the aristocracy. Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire.

The period also saw unprecedented social mobility, and anyone who wanted to distinguish himself as cultivated had to master the best version of English. These trends created a demand for handbooks and style manuals, which were soon shaped by market forces: the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore.

Most of the hobgoblins of contemporary prescriptive grammar (don't split infinitives, don't end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these 18th Century fads.

Done Mr P.

History of PG: Bryson, 1990; Crystal, 1987; Lakoff, 1990; McCrum, Cran & MacNeil, 1986; Nunberg, 1992.

Now, could you please post those 'other forums' that you have so often mentioned but failed to provide links as asked?

One odd thing: I don't notice many split infinitives in my limited reading of pre-C18 texts. I would have thought they'd be everywhere, if C18 prescriptive grammars had had the dramatic effect Pinker mentions on language. Yet I see surprisingly few. Why is this, do you think?

It's because, CJ butted in, the language is going to the dogs these days. (I hear murmurs and tongue-clucking.) Prescriptivists want to save the language by encouraging people to use it correctly, effectively, and beautifully. Descriptivists want to save it by redefining what is correct. (They have no interest in the effective or the beautiful. They literally don't care how people communicate nor how well, and they say so quite shamelessly! They just sit around with their notepads taking down the raw data, run it through some pattern recognition programs on a big computer, come up with fancy new terminology to describe what they've found, and advance themselves in their academic careers by playing scientist.)



(Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek! - And yet?)

I tend to agree that things are a little more complicated than the title of this thread would suggest. Two hypotheses and a bit of burble:

How D-ism affects the system it describes:
1. The Ds collect data and extract rules. The data and rules are tabulated and made public.
2. The D-data/rules influence grammars such as the CGEL.
3. People begin to cite the CGEL.
4. The CGEL begins to influence usage.
5. The next generation of Ds collects data influenced by the previous generation of Ds and extracts rules. The data and rules are tabulated...{loop}

How P-ism affects the system it prescribes:
1. The Ps collect data and extract rules.
2. The P-data/rules are collected in books such as Fowler's MEU.
3. People begin to cite MEU.
4. MEU begins to influence usage.
5. The next generation of Ps collects data and extracts rules influenced by the previous generation of Ps. The data and rules are tabulated...{loop}

And since the 'people' in D3 and P3 are the same people, D is also feeding into the P loop, and P is feeding into the D loop. So you can also say:

D5a. The next generation of Ds collects data influenced by the previous generation of Ps and extracts rules. The data and rules are tabulated...{loop}

P5a. The next generation of Ps collects data and extracts rules influenced by the previous generation of Ds. The data and rules are tabulated...{loop}

I would also be inclined to say that a seemingly D-ish grammar such as the CGEL is based upon hidden value judgements that are no different from the value judgements that underlie Fowler. And that Fowler, in his way, is a surreptitious D.

MrP

If these problems are unresolved, is it premature to call linguistics a science?

It depends on your definition of "science", I guess. Linguistics is a science. A "soft" science, a social science. (speech pathology is considered a "hard" science.)

Hey, hold on. Don't these apply to scientists in general (e.g., biologists, doctors)?

a) How to stand outside the system they're studying.
b) How to extract predictive rules.
3) How to ensure that their hypotheses are falsifiable.