Yes, Forbes, but the person from the non-standard background who receives the higher education will tend to be the more intelligent person from the non-standard background. The person from the standard background who moves down the social scale

It is reasonably typical - the people at the language log see no contradiction in endlessly pointing out "wrong" or "minority" usage - they just feel that since they back up their claims factually it is still

There is a tremendous amount of research going on all the time in linguistics, but I know of none that has enquired whether standard speakers are smarter than non-standard. Now I wonder why that is? Since the issue is a little too hot to touch,

IQ tests are a flawed thing, and good standard English will help you get a good score. But I'm willing to wager a large sum that standard speech and high IQ are closely linked. They most certainly seemed to be in my school and universities

The way the standard is taught is not "all important" - or at least if people who fail to use the standard are harshly penalized that is the important thing, and not what educators theorize about. In reality, in all our education systems

I think everybody code-switches to some degree, as long as there is some sort of reason to do so in their society. It doesn't mean they use two dialects just as a bilingual uses two languages, because (among other things) people often respond

I suppose the most obvious case in the US where the standard represents a disliked elite is when black people are said to be speaking "white" English. And that is precisely the situation where you see a little more of the phenomenon of

You seem to be working very hard to put all things into one of a small number of set patterns, Ouyang. I don't really follow why we would have to imagine than any X in "He seems X" would be a noun, rather than the more obvious

Yes, I think you could convincingly make that case Ouyang, but since I'm in favour of multiple categories, I'd like to create a separate one anyway for the copula "be", which is rather unlike other verbs. Dare is a little bit

I'm not sure why you say "tree" is the prototype of elm, oak etc Mr Micawber. It doesn't seem to match your explanation. Wouldn't a prototype of a tree be a very typical tree, such as an oak, or something, if we can even use