Grammar Rules
One downside to having a background in linguistics is that one is more sensitive to various so-called grammar rules that people regurgitate from their school years.
The majority of linguists probably view these rules the way a doctor would view the four humours. But a more fundamental issue is not that some of the theories have been superseded but that their perpetuation reveals a very unscientific approach to language. It is as if these people are viewing rules of grammar like they would road rules—human inventions that one may disagree with, but which are still, in some sense, what is "correct"—rather than, say, laws of physics that attempt to model observations.
This means that when confronted with data that doesn't match the rules, such people will say the data is wrong ("that isn't correct English") rather than ever consider that maybe it's their rules that need refinement.
Now it is certainly the case that people make mistakes when they speak (and that can be a revealing study in itself) and there is such a thing as good English usage (see the last paragraph) but most linguists focus on modeling the tacit intuitions native speakers have about their language which are very often at odds with the "rules of grammar" learnt at school.
Let me give an example. A common misconception is that English has cases that work in a similar way to Latin. I suspect the origins of this stem from attempts to model English after Latin as if Latin was somehow a better language.
It is easy to see on the surface there might be evidence for a nominative/accusative case distinction in English pronouns. Native speakers will say "I gave the book to him. He gave the money to me." with the intuition that switching "I" and "me" or "he" and "him" would be incorrect. This is a valid observation that a linguist would want to capture in some kind of descriptive rule.
However, when asked "who is it?" native speakers will almost always answer "it's me" rather than "?it's I".
I've had people try to tell me that the latter is "more correct" although they don't say it themselves. If they don't say it, as competent speakers of English, what is their claim to it being correct? Because their high school English teacher told them? Because Latin would use the nominative here?
If you ask a group of people "who wants to sit in the front?" they are far more likely to answer "me" than "?I". And yet they would say "I do" rather than "*me do". If you accuse someone you are probably more likely to say "it was him" not "?it was he". So what's going on doesn't just involve using the nominative case for the subject and accusative case for the object.
The massive 1,800+ page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language gives more great examples "nobody can do it but her/*she", "the only one who objected was me/?I" and (showing photos) "this one here is me/*I at the age of 12".
Things become even more complex in the case of conjunctions. The Cambridge Grammar gives the example of "they invited my partner and I to lunch". They point out that examples like this "are regularly used by a significant proportion of speakers of Standard English, and not generally thought by ordinary speakers to be non-standard". They go on to argue against the prescriptivist use of analogy with "they invited me/*I to lunch" to justify why the use of "I" is incorrect.
The worst kinds of rules are ones that sound almost like superstitions: don't use passives, don't use adverbs, don't split infinitives, don't end sentences with a preposition, don't start a sentence with "however" etc. They may help one adopt a particular style of writing, but they certainly aren't rules of grammar in any scientific sense and are, in most cases, completely arbitrary.
Some of the usage guides these rules are found in are better than others. Strunk and White is full of these arbitrary superstitions. In fact, Professor Geoffrey Pullum, the co-editor of the previously mentioned Cambridge Grammar of the English Language describes Strunk and White as a "horrid little notebook of nonsense" and instead recommends Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage which I own and agree is much more useful for evidence-based guidelines on subtle differences in usage between words.
Comments (14)
James Tauber on May 1, 2008:
I think Indians often fall into the same trap with Sanskrit as Europeans do with Latin, somehow thinking that it's so much more logical than their own language.
You can certainly say "your Sanskrit doesn't conform to the sutras of Pāṇini" but that's not quite the same thing. What makes Sanskrit unusual is not the consistency of the language itself but simply the extent to which an explicit system for describing the language was developed so long ago.
Incidentally, one thread of research in my PhD is arguing against Pāṇini's approach with respect to morphology. He was way ahead of his time but that doesn't mean he was ultimately correct :-)
André Roberge on May 1, 2008:
Interesting observations ... As a native French speaker, I have been baffled by English "rules" about the uses of "I" vs "me". For instance, the example you mentioned of "Who is it? It's me." as the common usage corresponds to the common AND correct translation in French "Qui est-ce? C'est moi." There is never any confusion about when to use "je" (I) and "moi" (me) in French - and their usage seems to follow the common (not necessarily "correct") usage in English.
Interesting that French, a "latin" language, is not following the "proper Latin rules" whereas, supposedly, English does (or should).
Pandammonium on May 1, 2008:
James, you said, "A common misconception is that English has cases that work in a similar way to Latin. I suspect the origins of this stem from attempts to model English after Latin as if Latin was somehow a better language."
I suspect that people think English has a case system for two (main) reasons. Firstly, the fact that Old English (see Beowulf) has case, with inflections and everything. This is one of the defining features of Old English as opposed to any other sort of English. The eventual decline of the case inflections was one of the factors that led to Middle English (see Chaucer) evolving, then some other stuff happened and we got Modern English (Shakespeare to the present day). The second reason is Chomsky. He apparently decided, in his infinite wisdom, to call subject, object and indirect object in English cases instead of just what they are, presumably because it sounds better to say 'nominative' than it does 'subject', almost certainly following Latin, as you say. Need I say more?
Many of the 'rules' you mention in your penultimate paragraph actually do stem from trying to fit round peg English into square peg Latin. It's from the days when they scholars were trying to get Englosh to be as prestigious as Latin, so they tried to latinise English. Are Latin infinitives ever split? I don't think so. Therefore English ones should never be split. (But, but...) A Latin preposition is just that: a pre-position; therefore it doesn't go at the end of the sentence. Therefore, the ones in English shouldn't go there either.
As far as Strunk and White goes, I saw a copy in a second hand book shop, and bought it to save some poor soul who doesn't know any better from its evil clutches. Have you seen the hypocrisy in that book? Don't use adjectives, it orders. Just you find a copy of that book and count the number of adjectives it contains.
As for the "my partner and me/I" thing, I was taught at school to remove the non-pronoun part, and test the sentence with each pronoun and see which sounds the best and use that. Hence, "They invited my partner and me" but "My partner and I invited them".
Oh, and you always have to put yourself last---I don't know if that's a prescription, a courtesy or what.
I read something somewhere about "it is I", not sure where, though. Anyway, the problem stems from saying "I am" in Latin, which is "ego sum", where ego is nominative. I will see if I can find where I read it...
James Tauber on May 1, 2008:
Pandammonium,
I didn't mean to imply that the notion that English has cases at all is due to Latin, but rather that the perception of which case to use in a particular context is affected by attempts to treat English as more Latin-like.
If I recall the case theory from GB was that the accusative case is the unmarked and the nominative is used because of the presence of a tensed verb. This actually explains the data I presented quite well, including why people say "me" but "I do" in answer to questions like "Who wants to sit in the front?"
James Tauber on May 1, 2008:
André,
Your French example of "Qui est-ce? C'est moi." is interesting. Does "je" get used anywhere other than *before* a verb?
Doug Napoleone on May 1, 2008:
This is one of the major reasons why stochastic language modeling hands down over the classic CFG approach. Linguists want to model the language with rules, and then describe the exceptions. Probabilistic approaches model observed behavior at a much finer granularity. It and can therefor handle any language it encounters, including the errors, and model reality.
The only real drawback to the stochastic approach is that it requires huge amounts of normalized, properly tagged, and accurate training data.
Pandammonium on May 1, 2008:
Oh, my mistake. And I wrote such a nice long essay for you as well... :)
Pandammonium on May 1, 2008:
There's a bit about the "It is I" thing on Crytal's blog: <http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-whomever.html> It's not where I first read it, but it'll do.
James Tauber on May 1, 2008:
It was still a nice essay, Pandammonium :-)
And thanks for the link to DC's great post on this topic.
André Roberge on May 2, 2008:
James:
"Je" can be used after a verb, in an hyphenated form, to indicate a question.
Suis-je un fan de Monty Python?
Am I a ... you get the idea ;-)
In spite of this inversion in word order, "je" is still clearly the subject.
I can't think of any other example where "je" would be used other than before a verb.
Furthermore, "je" would only be used as the single subject.
"You and I will go..." would be translated as
"Toi et moi irons..." rather than
"Tu et je irons ..."
James Tauber on May 2, 2008:
Doug,
I don't think stochastic versus rule-based is really the issue. It's certainly not the issue I intended to raise. My point was rather the difference between description and prescription and just how arbitrary and unscientific the latter is.
Even the staunchest rule-based linguists are anti-prescriptivist. Just take Chomsky himself.
Ali on May 30, 2008:
James, you might enjoy this 1920 book review I came across earlier this week:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9807E3DF103AE03ABC4F51DFB066838B639EDE
Randy on June 14, 2008:
I think one detail that Andre is leaving out which may be helpful when comparing French and English grammar is that French has more than two sets of personal pronouns. There are those corresponding to the English's "subject case", je, tu, il/elle, etc. and those corresponding to the "object case", me, te, se, etc. In addition to those, there are what I've seen referred to as "disjunctive pronouns", moi, toi, etc. These are the ones that are used with conjunctions (a word I understand has not been used in the Cambridge Grammar, but I do not know what else to call them :$), which is why you see "moi et toi" and not "je et tu", even though "I and you" would be the subject of the sentence if it were in English. There is at least one other set of personal pronouns in French that I know of, though I can't remember the label for them.
It has long been my suspicion that the "So-and-so and I" appearing in the object, even though "I" is, strictly speaking, the subject pronoun is a result of overcorrection. I recall when I was in grade two that my classmates were told that, for example, "Me and Phil played games" was wrong, and that they should say "Phil and I...". My guess is that numerous other students were told this, and from this they extracted the rule that "'I' is to be used with the conjunction 'and'," and apply this new rule whether it is the subject or object. So correcting an old error has resulted in a new error, though both of these errors occur so frequently, it's hardly justified to call them so. If I'm speaking carefully, I try to use "I" with subject, "me" with object, whether or not "and" is involved. Usually I say "me and Phil" when I'm not. If I'm feeling rebellious, I'll say "I and Phil", even though it is nonstandard. I asked my English prof about "I" always coming second when conjoined, and she said it had to do with politeness.
When I found out about French's disjunctive pronouns, I decided that "me" was one in English, even though I have never seen it labelled as such, and stopped caring so much.
I admit that I harbour a small amount of disdain for people who use "Phil and I" type constructions, not because I think they are wrong, but because I think they only use that construction because they are blindly reacting to a teacher's disapproval, and don't really understand the nature of the teacher's disapproval (I'm not sure if the teacher does either). I'm so immature.
Last Modified: May 1, 2008
Author: James Tauber
Suraj on May 1, 2008:
Let me introduce you to Sanskrit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_grammar) which has grammer in BNF notation and where you can say with confidence "your Sanskrit is wrong" :)