How infants learn English

Good day, Muhammad

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wotcher.

I see that @SamBC is earning reputation fast and furious.

Answering questions is fun. So, sometimes, is arguing over whether formal grammar rules matter. I seem to be too much the grammarian for some, and not enough for others.

@SamBC I see. Do you know about Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language? That is the definitive grammar today, and also its final chapter on punctuation is the only perfect guide I have come across on punctuation matters.

Ugh. Stop following me, @M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ.

Haha.

@Jasper I don't think any codification of English grammar can be truly complete; even if they are aiming to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, it requires picking a dialect to be 'right', and often ends up picking and choosing which bits of the dialect the linguist approves of and leaving out others.

Essentially, there is no such thing as a definitive description of the English language. There are languages that are formally and officially codified to some extent (such as French in France), but even in those cases actual usage usually deviates from the 'official' version.

And if someone could manage to fully describe even one dialect of the English language, without insisting that some common usage is wrong, it wouldn't be right for terribly long.

@SamBC That's true, but they do pick a dialect which is used and understood by most people, and also considered correct and standard by most people. That approach will also tell you if a certain usage is present in some non-standard dialect; but really, there aren't that many differences between dialects (hence dialects, not languages), so for the most part that matter is of little relevance.

@SamBC A descriptivist grammar is by my lights inherently synchronic, and the authors of the mentioned grammar (from 2002, by the way) do attempt to describe English in that manner.

(Well, inherently synchronic because a diachronic one would take you forever to write.)

Chapters 1 and 2 (the most important two, really) are available here for free.

Hm, "the most important two"? The most important ones. Eh.

Word of the eve: neonaticidal mother

@SamBC I meant “not searching” was the one thing they did wrong ;)

@SamBC on the other hand, if you understand grammar as simply a reference for measuring how “standard” an utterance is and not as a rule book for “right” and “wrong” it’s a lot more useful

Things can be non-standard and still work, either more elegantly or less elegantly than the standard.

@ColleenV Yes, though it still depends a lot on register, context and so on. The problem I have with the word 'standard' might come from other parts of my life, where 'standard' actually means a yardstick to measure by and declare things right and wrong.

Poetry can be ungrammatical in a good way, and some people can construct perfectly grammatical but unintelligible sentences...

@SamBC you have the wrong definition of standard;) innovation is non-standard but not wrong

Standards are just a means for things to work together easily

We may or may not need to meet the standard depending on our purpose

Well, there is the other sense of standards as in “ I have high standards” but that’s not what most people mean by “standard English”

@ColleenV In technical fields, which is where I've spent more of my time, a standard is something to be obeyed. Many technical standards leave room for innovation, by leaving the possibility of doing things that aren't in the standard, but you must do the things in the standard in accordance with the standard. If you want to implement a web-server, you can't get too creative with the HTTP standard.

So, this is an example of me bringing in a sort of loaded meaning from the context of my own life.

@SamBC I’m an engineer, so it’s not necessarily a feature of technical fields :)

@userr2684291 The problem I have with their identification of what constitutes "international standard English" is that almost all of their sources to use to determine what is standard are fairly conservative institutions. The language that people use to communicate day-to-day, whether in speech or writing, will differ from that.

Standards should be obeyed if the requirements demand it, but there’s nothing that requires English be standard to be correct.

@userr2684291 The sources are also all things that tend to use a formal register (except in, say, dialogue). If a person is only comfortable communicating in a formal register, then they are not going to be able to function practically in a language. So yes, teach the expectations of formal register, but don't teach them as "this is right". People get taught prescriptively using descriptive grammars as their rulebook sometimes, and that just does my head in.

The requirements are what determines if you are correct or incorrect, not the standard

The requirements for language are that you can be understood as unambiguously as possible. Standard grammar helps with that sometimes, and hurts others

@ColleenV Yes, but to me if you say you're making an HTTP server, that means you will meet the standard for the specified version of HTTP. That would be considered an implicit requirement. So if you say there is a "standard English", that implies an expectation that English will be judged against that standard. I don't say that's the right way to interpret it, just what my life experience leads me to interpret it as.

Ever seen someone twist their sentence into knots avoiding a preposition at the end?

(which is another problem with language, of course - the fact that we all have our personal lexicon and we can't predict how someone else's will differ from our own)

@ColleenV Ah yes, the famous Churchill quote. I keep meaning to check if that one is real... but it makes the point whether it is or not.

Of course, if you do want to follow the "no preposition at the end of a sentence" rule, you can almost always do it without convoluted sentences - you just need to rephrase more radically.

@SamBC people are not computers and try to force our expression into the equivalent of computer instructions is not constructive

There’s no similarity

We aren’t just exchanging data

Wow, so much conversation!

I feel like you're trying to convince me of something. The problem is, you're either trying to convince me that my reaction to 'standard' isn't the conventional one - in which case there's no need, I'm quite willing to accept that - or you're trying to convince me that I shouldn't have that reaction at all, which is a problem because people can't decide to change the connotations they subconsciously apply just because someone thinks they're wrong. Even if they think they're wrong.

Though even if it's not the conventional reaction, I know I'm not the only person who reacts to it that way.

@SamBC I’m not trying to persuade you to change your mind, just to look at it differently for a minute

Right and wrong are counterproductive

Oh, I get it from other perspectives. Looking at things from lots of angles is one of my many curses. When people try to get me to adjudicate an argument, they end up both thinking I'm on the other person's side.

Granted, I’m an electrical engineer and I’m old, so I live in a world where there isn’t right and wrong so much as doesn’t work, works, works well etc.

@Jasper Greeting Jasperino. Happy Friday

In computer science and programming, right and wrong are often orthogonal to works/doesn't work.

@ColleenV Haha! I am wondering where Jasperino comes from. What gave you the idea for this new word?

@SamBC not really. How much bad code have you seen that works but is slow or doesn’t scale

@Jasper You can add “ino” on to some names to be jovial

There is an old Saturday Night Live comedy skit where a character changes peoples names

Let me see if I can find it ...

@ColleenV Oh I see. The first word that comes to mind when I think of -ino is neutrino, which is some kind of particle in physics, I think.

news.avclub.com/…

Oh I know Rob Schneider from the movie Deuce Bigalow, which I did not watch.

Some of his comedy isn’t my taste, but “makin' copies” sticks in my head

Talkin' English with Jasperino and The Sam-man! ;)

No, I don't talk English here, I only talk crap, LOL.

nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/copy-machine/n10022

Ah, the video above is available only in the US, I think.

@ColleenV Well, "works" is context-dependent as well ;) but what I really meant is that you can do something that is absolutely textbook-perfect and meets all of the actual definitions in a standard, and does not work in any practical sense. There are a variety of circumstances that lead to that.

@SamBC That's not at all what the book is about or is trying to describe.

I'm going by their explanation of what constitutes international standard English in chapter 1.

@SamBC I think the underlying problem for me is that right and wrong are unnecessarily binary concepts to be applied to something like language. English's power is in its expressiveness. Sometimes to fully express what I mean, I need to do something non-standard like put “ino” on the end of Jaspers name

They only mention those institutions in order to identify the countries from which they draw their definition of Standard English.

@ColleenV Well, while "right" and "wrong" might be traditionally considered absolute adjectives, in practice we know that sometimes there are several right answers, but some are more right than others.

@userr2684291 That's... not how the paragraph reads to me.

"The consensus is confirmed by the decisions of broadcasting authorities about the kind of English that will be used for public information announcements, newscasts, commentaries to broadcasts of national events such as state funerals, and so on."

"It is confirmed by the writing found in magazines, newspapers, novels, and non-fiction books; by the editing and correcting that is done by the publishers of these"

Confirmed indeed. : )

Not defined.

They describe and identify both formal and informal English equally, and they don't say "you should use formal English only" at all (it really depends on the situation), and as far as dialects are concerned, non-standard simply means not Standard English – which doesn't mean it's in some way inferior, just not chosen as a reference point, I suppose, and not as widely used.

Read the rest of the chapter (in particular section 2.2) and you'll see what I mean.

My problem is when grammars like that are used as references, as standards when teaching English as a foreign language. Very few real-life contexts are going to have people working in Standard English. The non-standard things might be lexicographic or grammatical, but they will be there. Someone learning Standard English only is going to get quite lost if they are then thrust into a workplace that uses management-speak, and the people using that don't usually even think of it as jargon.

If they go to work in an English-speaking country in the care sector, say (which in this country is a popular sector for immigrants), then the conversations between staff may be heavily dialect-based. Never mind the fact that some people really do teach as if the formal register is all there is (I say that not necessarily referring to that book in any way)

@SamBC The grammar of the English language is pretty much invariant across dialects. That book attempts to describe it.

The tiny differences are still mentioned in the book.

I wouldn't call it "pretty much invariant". The fact there's a clear majority of factors, rules etc that are consistent is a long way short of "pretty much invariant".

@SamBC Use the words that best express what you mean. If you don’t mean right or wrong, then you should find a better way to express it. The language we use affects how we perceive things. If you say “this is right” you also make it “good”. Fine, except when you run into a dialect that says it “wrong” which implies “bad” even though you understand what they’re saying perhaps even better than if it were standard. Like I said, not constructive to equate “grammatical” and “right”

But I suppose I should get back to Engineering and stop annoying y'all with my philosophisizing

@ColleenV I feel like we're somehow talking at cross purposes here, because I agree with what you say here but you say it like you think we disagree... the question of conflating grammatical and right is a problem with how languages are taught.

> The number of differences in grammar between different varieties of Standard English is very small indeed relative to the full range of syntactic constructions and morphological word-forms. Nevertheless, there undoubtedly are differences of this kind that need to be noted.

I assure you, there aren't that many differences between the grammars of AmE and BrE, for example.

Oh, aye? And between 'standard' BrE and, say, English as spoken in central Texas? Or between 'standard' AmE and English as spoken in Newcastle? Never mind each national 'standard' and the dialects in that country...

@SamBC which brings me back to “standard” English being a reference point, not a measure of rightness/wrongness. TaDa! Seriously though, I’m just jabbering while my scripts are running, not trying to make a point

We still have dialects of English here in Britain that have the T-V distinction (though they are, sadly, dying out).

The main point is, though, that even if the number of differences is small, it can still be sufficient to cause massive problems of intelligibility.

@SamBC most intelligibility problems are vocabulary not grammar in English

@SamBC Well that's true even if both parties are native speakers of standard varieties of English.

For example, an American man shopping for suspenders in the UK

I wonder if there are such sayings in English.

Whatever I say is correct, that is the end of the matter.

@Jasper Matter is endless. Hawking said that.

> "If the universe is finite but unbounded, it is also possible that the universe is smaller than the observable universe. In this case, what we take to be very distant galaxies may actually be duplicate images of nearby galaxies, formed by light that has circumnavigated the universe."

Thus spake Wikipedia.

@CowperKettle interesting- I can’t think of any off the top of my head, but if I find one I’m going to start using it!

We do have “Don’t try to teach pigs to sing, it wastes your time and annoys the pigs”

But that’s not the same thing

@snailboat the problem is that many teachers do conflate them in that way.

(though rarely do native speaker teachers do so)

That user loves comment threads

They want discussions in my experience and that’s why you end up with a lot of back and forth

@SamBC Just FYI the plural forms of tags are preferred- I can’t find the discussion from the ELL meta right now

I know you’re doing a lot of great work on cleaning stuff up, so I wanted to mention it

As soon as I find that discussion I intend to link it to the contributors guide

@ColleenV I just search to see what appropriate tags already exist. I wouldn't dare create a new tag yet :)

There's an existing tag "antecedent", but not "antecedents".

Mmmeh

@SamBC Only create a tag if you can immediately apply it to 5 questions

Plural or singular doesn't/shouldn't matter, there's always tag synonyms

Yeah, looking at how to create those... not sure I can see a way.

@userr2684291 Long-winded rant on "SE sites are not social networks"

I mean, @ColleenV said to use plurals by preference, so all that was in response to this.

@SamBC Synonyms?

It requires WISDOM level8, and STAMINA level6

@SamBC yeah I have to rename and make a synonym

^ Weapon needed: Magic mop

Tags are a big can of worms. Honestly I think some people’s browsers filter the out because a good portion of folks don’t care about them

Hmm, so technically "mod agreement" would be Hogwart's school hall rules

@ColleenV The majority of people on any site don't know how to use tags effectively or don't care enough to, even on SO. But that minority that WOULD include them in their searches could do very useful things with them

That's why a concentrated effort on organizing them can be really fruitful, but my stamina and health bar aren't doing all too well

P.S. my previous efforts may have partly been misguided (don't use this in a court against me)

Shog said something of real value: It's mostly about what tags should be on a question that aren't than what tags are that shouldn't be

I wish I had some magic tag wand... We can’t even fix incrementally because bad tagging is happening faster than I can edit

@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Shog the Wise

I agree that it's more important to have the right tags than it is to not have the wrong ones.

So [grammar] sucks nonetheless but it's much more important that questions about perfect contain a perfect than questions about punctuation not contain [grammar]

Well, it depends on the site, but that's what it seems like to me here.

The only downside is it's much easier to trust a random bunch of editors to mow grass than to cater for delicate weird-ass tropical plants

But I guess there would be no choice

There's also the issue of too many tags with too much overlap. We should just agree on whether to use [perfect] and [past] or [past-perfect]

Aaaand that's the end of my midnight ramblings. Night

yawns

Dobroy nochi

Hey, that's a handy bot.