Focus on form

[rdearman]

Boork bee boooahhel. <== and it is correct because I'm a native speaker. Dork dannd beebsoool. Bang big hhheall.

"Native language is an agreed standard by various elitist institutions."

Babbba bee habd de bork bagga. Beeda boo boo hall alloo. <== no more elitist institutions for me... but good luck understanding me. badd beorf begg grabbiss golbelegook biggareed.

None of them are "wrong."

Tapefiec tas reremon soket ta ienedun lodepa. Meloli tutarie reg ienace siecucis pemin ciliw cie. Nob ceh seteb la te tedorem lafot jal. Urer ekerovi sesiril iebetu oses neloma ceseca tete atatanag; ekolak berusa riterab nafolo ticied reb.

I don't be thinking that be correct, cause wen I's axe my ma she says I talking like a fool.

What you meant to say is "Native language is an agreed standard by various elitist institutions." That is a more accurate reflection of your views, whereas what you actually said only agrees with my argument.

I'm consistently astounded by the sheer obstinacy with which people assert their pseudoscientific opinions about language. Not that I think you're an obstinate person; I think it's just cultural habit, namely being told from a young age about what supposedly is and isn't valid language.

Letol omi lel siecis situdap lecele elieluvec sutig lunie co. Emieboca onat papi yaya ibi lo civora kolipor pecete cie? Datened laca inohi lo oye agesed hes tieyu. Cisi ce hiso bobeh toninu seciti coy irinot lis. Cud milanag onifat has fipiri de lenope! Tini ige fatup mena puron lu. Letote refa bi. Tun celotes zorute?

Royepoy yat lebiru esayotie eyod roricil ielelab ato regorod nelo. Deti cede fa qan. Usinedar me dune tasip nelite! Enem reyume ima acidir riehom; pilur ataxip tano iyac upa ice fon pipeye. Poce doro rosareh me tote reg orirofat.

Rogip ratesec cafana yarelo oridagov hire hifas babeti co golap! Iresame iesilej sin eme; ocecociv enese regani ro lare tesanol lonob ina; yugoyen re rarosu nal arah elicir acaw fitaril dosuw. Ritadom pig canare rasara hani. Mimatec domone leyat nuliecer uhecire loz nagar ahab miferiel fecube. Rot vap asacuy. Molul ceh mesa delija ha roye ogar ni imife: Talie nacel ilegiga sucar la omayibe latas hor conetay amebuda.

"all native language is correct"

I don't be thinking that be correct, cause wen I's axe my ma she says I talking like a fool. But I's liken dis new thing wheres I is always right evens when I don't talk good, cause now yous has told me I is always right cause I is a native speaker and I ain't gotta fallow no rules. I's a native talker so I ain't gotta talk good no more.

First up... "talking like a fool" -- that's the problem here. If talking like the people around you is taken as a sign of low intelligence, that is an implicit negative appraisal of the people around you. I'm all for genuine social justice ("political correctness" as Uncle Roger would have it) and judging vast swathes of people as "fools" because of their local culture is... well, it's just thoroughly objectionable.

It has been used throughout history (and to this day in some places) to justify the suppression of indigenous people in pretty much every colonised country in history.
It has been used historically to justify continued segregation of black people in the US.
It has been used to further marginalise and impoverish rural populations in most so-called "civilised" countries
Hell, it was even used by eugenicists to identify who was "mentally deficient" and therefore a candidate for forced sterilisation.

Consider two kids, Albert and Benny.
Albert's parents are from middle class cosmopolitan backgrounds and speak standard English. Albert is brought up to speak standard English, and spends most of his pre-school years playing with toys with practically no educational value.
Benny's parents are from a rural farming community and speak a very distinct variety of African-American Vernacular English. Albert's pre-school years are spent playing with toys that encourage number awareness, pattern recognition and problem solving.

Albert and Benny start at the same school on the same day. Which one sounds "intelligent" and which one "sounds like a fool"?

How much someone looks, sounds and acts like me is not a valid measure of intelligence, and we have to stop pretending it is.

"all native language is correct"

Not all native language is correct, or I could just utter any old bollocks and call it English.

Sorry, that's a total strawman. Native language is a mechanism in the brain that spontaneously produces utterances. If you "utter any old bollocks", you're not using the native language circuitry, because it cannot produce nonsense (unless you're concussed, suffer a brain injury or are under the influence of a mind-altering substance... which leads to the interesting philosophical question as to whether poetry written while taking an acid trip qualifies as language or not).

Native language is an agreed standard, otherwise nobody could understand each other. The agreement might change over time, but sweeping statements like all native language is correct isn't correct.

At the risk of sounding all Mr. Spock, that is illogical.

Sedegoc bica gere osurer gimina me izukexiel pacofac? Sicer atayenu hin idebiera. Fig dep awucere bose men oti ce porohu corifof onenidi? Nibeno iyololac itolusok tesa ogoni eyipa fim; onenise soviga yot babim foladil aceyek gera cer.

Lew ehanun rela itape sobehe olocov seman won; era emul neril. Ime esamibuw penesi decom!!!

Yugim mena pegi ramodon. Ehofe inenune torucol etedem du efala itak eni neri. Pumele sures cutuna pet ti catu ti: Tin kucemo ehotema xede agogoho. Enese golami tavenor ro pabin ruro, tapa pilah tone tidu icobe pine uget iehelirip. Nibuta sace canad. Neci wo gienecij le umebu cabi revanab zurakep, teniros coro momibey egor erotay yoh cel sipa si. Ehe eposolif elib ema caso tepiwe tinones?

But anything I utter is correct by your definition. So by your definition all my speech above is correct. But you probably didn't understand my arguments? I'm not concerned with political correctness or any of the justifications you've put forward, because now your just backtracking on the sweeping statement you said. I am arguing that a HUGE sweeping statement that "all native language is correct" is complete and utter bollocks. I used non-elitist new English. It is non-elitist because I didn't have my new English words dictated to me by elitist institutions, I uttered pure English which I just made up right now, and because I'm a native English speaker, "all native language is correct". So all the above is amazing wonderful good English. It isn't my fault all of you are still using old Elitist English. Not like me, I'm far beyond that. I use the new native English.

So please ignore alfred and benny and tell me how "all native language is correct". Given that you didn't understand anything I typed above. Please defend the statement "all native language is correct". Given that anything a native speaker says is their native language.

[Iversen]

I think the idea that native speakers are infallible can be traced back to Chomsky, who didn't see the point in spending his time on interminable field studies when he just could ask any native speaker (like himself in case of English) whether a sentence is grammatical or not. Somehow that has lead to the assumption that any native speaker would be able to judge any utterance in his/her native language ... and I don't even remember a caveat about dialects or socialects or other internal divisions within a language.

I think it was a bold, but sensible move to take since it would save him millions of hours cataloguing all kinds of grammatical constructions (as the indefatigable old breed of grammarians did) while trying to find the holes where a construction was impossible. But I doubt that I would be able to judge all sentences uttered by other Danes. For instance I once during my study time wrote an article about sentence knots (like in this sentence which I claim contains a sentence knot), and I wrote that a certain construction with the relative pronoun as subject wasn't possible. Shortly after I found a handwritten message pinned up on a wall which contained precisely this construction. It didn't change my opinion about its grammaticality, but at least one other Dane was apparently equipped with an internal grammar that allowed it.

And then there is the question of errors. I know English well enough to know that native speakers also make errors, and I would be very sceptical about the judgments of any native speaker who would deny this. But the original point was not whether native speakers always speak and write in impeccable English (or rather: impeccably in their own variant of English) - they don't. The point was whether they always are able to judge whether any sentence in any variant of their language is grammatical or not, and this is not as wrong as the claim about infallibility, but still not the pure godsend truth.

[Cainntear]

But anything I utter is correct by your definition. So by your definition all my speech above is correct. But you probably didn't understand my arguments? I'm not concerned with political correctness or any of the justifications you've put forward, because now your just backtracking on the sweeping statement you said. I am arguing that a HUGE sweeping statement that "all native language is correct" is complete and utter bollocks. I used non-elitist new English. It is non-elitist because I didn't have my new English words dictated to me by elitist institutions, I uttered pure English which I just made up right now, and because I'm a native English speaker, "all native language is correct". So all the above is amazing wonderful good English. It isn't my fault all of you are still using old Elitist English. Not like me, I'm far beyond that. I use the new native English.

So please ignore alfred and benny and tell me how "all native language is correct". Given that you didn't understand anything I typed above. Please defend the statement "all native language is correct". Given that anything a native speaker says is their native language.

I already addressed that, and it's a shame you're choosing to ignore that.

Your native language is controlled by neural pathways, circuitry in your brain -- your own personal grammar. Anything you spontaneously say using that circuitry is a fully correct English utterance. None of your Strawmanese above was generated spontaneously through your native English grammar, so it's not English.

Now is it even language? Is there any consistent mapping of semantics to meaning? I strongly suspect not, because I don't recall you ever saying you were an active conlanger.

I don't know how you can sit there and try to suggest that a series of banged keys is in any way comparable to a well-developed, sophisticated, systematic collection of grammatical patterns used by a group of people you are not a part of.

[kulaputra]

Boork bee boooahhel. <== and it is correct because I'm a native speaker. Dork dannd beebsoool. Bang big hhheall.

Did you not read what Cainntear wrote about spontaneous production, or did you just feel like being intentionally immature?

I think the idea that native speakers are infallible can be traced back to Chomsky

The idea is as old as modern scientific linguistics, actually.

ho didn't see the point in spending his time on interminable field studies when he just could ask any native speaker (like himself in case of English) whether a sentence is grammatical or not.

I'm not sure where you got this idea. That is what linguistic field work is: asking native speakers if they think a given utterance is grammatical.

Somehow that has lead to the assumption that any native speaker would be able to judge any utterance in his/her native language ... and I don't even remember a caveat about dialects or socialects or other internal divisions within a language.

Remember from what exactly? Any textbook has such caveats as a matter of course.

I think it was a bold, but sensible move to take since it would save him millions of hours cataloguing all kinds of grammatical constructions (as the indefatigable old breed of grammarians did)

Sorry to burst your bubble but linguists do this all the time. Some enjoy it; others, like Chomsky, prefer to reference the existing field work of other linguists.

But I doubt that I would be able to judge all sentences uttered by other Danes. For instance I once during my study time wrote an article about sentence knots (like in this sentence which I claim contains a sentence knot), and I wrote that a certain construction with the relative pronoun as subject wasn't possible. Shortly after I found a handwritten message pinned up on a wall which contained precisely this construction. It didn't change my opinion about its grammaticality, but at least one other Dane was apparently equipped with an internal grammar that allowed it.

I would be shocked if it were only one. I'm sure that's valid in at least one Danish dialect.

And then there is the question of errors. I know English well enough to know that native speakers also make errors, and I would be very sceptical about the judgments of any native speaker who would deny this.

Probably most everything you think is an error, isn't for that speaker. Regarding slips of the tongue, etc., Cainntear covered that already, scroll up and see the section about linguistic performance vs. competence.

But the original point was not whether native speakers always speak and write in impeccable English (or rather: impeccably in their own variant of English) - they don't. The point was whether they always are able to judge whether any sentence in any variant of their language was grammatical or not, and this is not as wrong as the claim about infallibility, but still not the pure godsend truth.

Variants of a language are exactly that- variants. I'm not fluent in AAVE and I won't pretend to be able to judge grammaticality (except, cautiously, based on what I've read of it in my coursework, but with the major caveat that I am not a native speaker and may be wrong). Native speakers are fluent speakers of their own dialect and therefore perfectly capable of judging utterances in that dialect.

[rdearman]

I banged out those words using ny English speaking neural network on my English keyboard. So my non elitist English is valid. But you seem to be saying it is wrong and immature. Make iup your minds, are all utterances of a native speaker correct or not?

[Cainntear]

I think the idea that native speakers are infallible can be traced back to Chomsky, who didn't see the point in spending his time on interminable field studies when he just could ask any native speaker (like himself in case of English) whether a sentence is grammatical or not. Somehow that has lead to the assumption that any native speaker would be able to judge any utterance in his/her native language ... and I don't even remember a caveat about dialects or socialects or other internal divisions within a language.

The link to Chomsky at this point is pretty tenuous. Chomsky's whole idea of grammaticality was pretty weird and all but disregarded in modern linguistics (the notion that syntax has no semantic content is utterly preposterous, and I still find it hard to imagine how anyone actually accepted that in the first place).

The modern notion of descriptivism and the plurality of acceptable native forms has nothing whatsoever to do with grammaticality judgements. Instead, it's about corpora. If you look at a corpus of one person's speech, you can start to map out a rough approximation in the speaker's internal grammar. If you look at a corpus of a whole village's speech, you can map out the shared grammar of the local dialect. Expand this to a country or the whole world and you can map out features that occur frequently in wider areas or recur in disparate areas.

In linguistics, it is not considered particularly controversial to say that if a particular feature occurs frequently then it is a legitimate variation. The only open question is how frequently it must occur to be considered significant.

Certainly, "I would have done it if you would have told me" is far from the majority use in English, but it occurs frequently enough in the US that I've heard it on TV. There's a similar construction in Spanish, and the Real Academia readily accepts it. The RAE is far more open to multiple forms than other academies, and this is because it is a single academy comprising academics from a number of different Spanish-speaking countries, and some forms (such as this one) may be in a minority in Spain, but are the most frequent form in certain South American countries. National pride means former colonies are unlikely to let their former colonial masters dictate to them what "correct" language is (see also Noah Webster).

I wrote that a certain construction with the relative pronoun as subject wasn't possible. Shortly after I found a handwritten message pinned up on a wall which contained precisely this construction. It didn't change my opinion about its grammaticality, but at least one other Dane was apparently equipped with an internal grammar that allowed it.

The question is how many Danes would say something like that, and is it documented in a corpus?

We can make as many grammaticality judgements as we like, but we're still only human, and our idea of grammaticality is affected by our own palette of dialects and sociolects, and by the conscious knowledge of prescriptive "rules" our teachers gave us as children. Descriptive linguistics is about cold, hard stats, and if there's empirical evidence that a significant number of Danes do indeed produce spontaneous utterance with that grammatical feature, there's no justification for calling it impossible.

[Cainntear]

I banged out those words using ny English speaking neural network on my English keyboard. So my non elitist English is valid. But you seem to be saying it is wrong and immature. Make iup your minds, are all utterances of a native speaker correct or not?

Three possibilities:

1) You are actively, deliberately lying to prove a point.
2) You genuinely believe that you produced that using the bit of your brain that generates English spontaneously.
3) You have just suffered a stroke or head trauma, or you have a tumour growing in your brain.

If it is 3, you should go straight to hospital and ask for a CAT scan.
If it is 2, you're wrong. Sorry.
If it is 1, why would you do that straight after calling for a civilised debate, and references?

[rdearman]

Or 5 I am correct and you have made a generalised sweeping statement which is logically unsupportable.

[Cainntear]

Or 5 I am correct and you have made a generalised sweeping statement which is logically unsupportable.

At the risk of sounding flippant, please feel free to submit an article to a journal and revolutionise the field of linguistics.

[rdearman]

Look. You made a sweeping generalization about huge groups of people. I am not arguing linguistics, I am arguing that not everything that comes out of a natives mouth or keyboard is correct. Yet I have shown you written proof that this assertion is not correct. You aren't defending your statement. If you had used the word "most" or "generally" I wouldn't have batted an eyelid, but you didn't you said "all native language is correct".

All - Used to refer to the whole quantity or extent of a particular group or thing

This is a sweeping generalization which I take exception to. All means that not once in the entire human history in any language has there been an error spoken by a native speaker of that language.

This is the position I want you to prove. Prove no human ever has made an incorrect statement.