Search results for 'tag:Negations tag:Plurals' matching tags 'Negations' and 'Plurals'

Re: neither taking a plane nor a ship

Mister Micawber — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:13:42 GMT

.
All are OK and all are awkward. Natives normally front the negation and use the plural:

She has never traveled abroad because she doesn't like taking planes or ships.

Re: Standard spoken English

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:00:04 GMT

Something to chew on:

THE NOTION OF STANDARD SPOKEN GRAMMAR

The term âstandard grammarâ is most typically associated with written language,
and is usually considered to be characteristic of the recurrent usage of adult,
educated native speakers of a language. Standard grammar ideally reveals no
particular regional bias. Thus âStandard British Englishâ grammar consists of items
and forms that are found in the written usage of adult educated native speakers
from Wales, Scotland and England and those Northern Irish users who consider
themselves part of the British English speech community.

The typical sources of evidence for standard usage are literary texts, quality
journalism, academic and professional writing, etc. Standard grammar is given the
status of the official record of educated usage by being written down in grammar
books and taught in schools and universities.

Spoken transcripts often have frequent occurrences of items and structures
considered incorrect according to the norms of standard written English. However,
many such forms are frequently and routinely used by adult, educated native speakers.

Examples of such structures are split infinitives (e.g. We decided to immediately sell it),
double negation (e.g. He wonât be late I donât think, as compared to I donât think he will
be late), singular nouns after plural measurement expressions (e.g. Heâs about six foot
tall), the use of contracted forms such as gonna (going to), wanna (want to), and so on.

Standard spoken English grammar will therefore be different from standard
written English grammar in many respects if we consider âstandardâ to be a
description of the recurrent spoken usage of adult native speakers. What may be
considered ânon-standardâ in writing may well be âstandardâ in speech.
Speech and writing are not independent. Although some forms of spoken
grammar do not appear in writing (unless in written dialogues), there is
considerable overlap and there is an increasing range of forms appearing in
informal written texts which previously were only considered acceptable in
speech. In 120 the presence of typically spoken grammatical forms contexts as emails and internet chat-room exchanges is discussed.

From: The Cambridge Grammar of English (GCE)

Re: Bilingual

Cool Breeze — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:06:07 GMT

Anonymous
Websters is more of a descriptive dictionary. Cambridge and Oxford are prescriptive. I think that explains why Webster's has it as a noun. As our language evolves (becomes degraded), the more we'll find things in Websters that aren't widesly accepted by grammarians.

I agree with your analysis regarding the character of the two dictionaries. If change equal degradation, English was ruined hundreds of years ago. There are countless examples of that: the use of the auxiliary do in questions and negations, the use of s as a nearly universal plural ending, the use of which and who as relative pronouns etc. Also, more than 99 percent of modern English spellings are incorrect compared with what they were 1200 years ago. The language is completely corrupt if we accept the premise that change equals degradation.

The funny thing is that most people don't consider past changes bad, only those that happen in their lifetime. I fail to understand the logic behind that reasoning.