Questions:
(1) What should I do when someone refuses to provide evidence to substantiate their statements, which I believe are incorrect?
(2) How should I respond when they tell me to take their word for it because they are a native speaker, even after I provided authoritative evidence that c...
Articles are particularly difficult to explain though. We have them in Swedish too, with a more or less one-to-one correlation with English, and usually when asked why it should be one way or the other, I cannot seem to explain it...
What I think surprisingly many people don't seem to understand though, is that there are no exact rules when it comes to languages (if there were, languages would never evolve). A native speaker will really only be able to use his "native authority" when it comes to the specific regional and sociolectal way of speaking that he grew up with.
I remember a test where you were supposed to put prepositions into empty gaps in various sentences. The test would then try to estimate what part of the English speaking world you were from (or if you were a non-native). I cannot attest for how accurate…
If I left a comment every time I disagreed with a claim by a native speaker about some usage, you would be seeing me popping up everywhere you looked. I do wish people would use a little more caution and reflection (and preferably some research) when pronouncing (especially negatively) on grammaticality and idiomaticity.
Questions:
(1) What should I do when someone refuses to provide evidence to substantiate their statements, which I believe are incorrect?
(2) How should I respond when they tell me to take their word for it because they are a native speaker, even after I provided authoritative evidence that c...
Japanese Language
Japanese Language