InterConnection between Language Learning and Acquisition

[Cainntear]

What do you mean by take into account?
Do you mean descriptivists should only describe what is prescribed by prescriptivists?

Only when people try speak and write as prescribed by prescriptivists.

How many people? Because every language has some people who insist something is "right" and something else is "a mistake".

[Odair]

There is a driving force that has caused us to have big national languanges, instead of a continuum of dialects. That is the effort of the majority of the population to (albeit imperfectly) conform their speech patterns to one prestige variant.

Did you ever see a grammar book describing the grammar that is used by a smaller population, such as a small neighbourhood in a specific city? There are no such grammars, other than perhaps as a very niche field of research.

So any book named "Grammar of (Big National Language)" is clearly reproducing the biases of prescriptivist grammars, even if pretending to adopt a desciptivist approach.

[galaxyrocker]

Did you ever see a grammar book describing the grammar that is used by a smaller population, such as a small neighbourhood in a specific city? There are no such grammars, other than perhaps as a very niche field of research.

.

They exist all the time. I can name at least three different grammars for one subdialect of Irish, at that. And several for various dialects of English.

And, while theoretically there's only one "standard" grammar -- most people don't speak that and instead of speak that and instead speak a dialect.

[Cainntear]

There is a driving force that has caused us to have big national languanges, instead of a continuum of dialects. That is the effort of the majority of the population to (albeit imperfectly) conform their speech patterns to one prestige variant.

Sorry, you're wrong there. Many features of the English language are converging on patterns that were never imposed.

The majority have never accepted the Latin-derived proscription against ending sentences with prepositions, and have instead retained the Germanic pattern where there's a very blurred line between preposition and adverbs.

The zero-conjunction, much derided by the prescriptivists, is the preferred option of the vast majority of native speakers.

"Whom" is mostly commonly used in modern media as a means to mark someone out as a posh, snobby and/or pretentious.

When I was at primary school, we weren't allowed to write in contractions -- no "can't do , won't do, hasn't done" etc. And yet outside of academia, pretty much everyone happily uses them in speaking and writing.


Hell, the very fact that prescriptivists keep complaining about "common errors" is direct proof that the prescriptivists are in the minority about a hell of a lot of things.

We're perfectly capable of reaching consensus through use and don't need a structure imposed from self-appointed authorities.

[sirgregory]

There is a driving force that has caused us to have big national languanges, instead of a continuum of dialects. That is the effort of the majority of the population to (albeit imperfectly) conform their speech patterns to one prestige variant.

Sorry, you're wrong there. Many features of the English language are converging on patterns that were never imposed.

The majority have never accepted the Latin-derived proscription against ending sentences with prepositions, and have instead retained the Germanic pattern where there's a very blurred line between preposition and adverbs.

The zero-conjunction, much derided by the prescriptivists, is the preferred option of the vast majority of native speakers.

"Whom" is mostly commonly used in modern media as a means to mark someone out as a posh, snobby and/or pretentious.

When I was at primary school, we weren't allowed to write in contractions -- no "can't do , won't do, hasn't done" etc. And yet outside of academia, pretty much everyone happily uses them in speaking and writing.


Hell, the very fact that prescriptivists keep complaining about "common errors" is direct proof that the prescriptivists are in the minority about a hell of a lot of things.

We're perfectly capable of reaching consensus through use and don't need a structure imposed from self-appointed authorities.

Surely there is a "driving force" for consolidation of languages, no? But I think it has a lot more to do with economics than grammar. Knowing a big "empire" language will generally open up a lot of educational and professional opportunities that won't be available to a monolingual speaker of a small, localized language. For example, a Mam speaker in Central America has a major incentive to learn Spanish and as you move up the economic ladder there is further incentive to learn English. At a certain point maintaining the minority language becomes costly and younger generations gravitate toward a bigger language. One way to say it is that there are "network effects" to a language in that the benefit of knowing it probably increases with the number of users, at least over a certain range.

Also, I don't think Odair is totally off about there being a "prestige" aspect to the process of language consolidation. But I suspect this is mostly due to the association of the "empire" with education, wealth, power, etc., not so much with the actual features of the big languages. If I look up the definition of provincial, it says, 1) "of or concerning a province of a country or empire." 2) "of or concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded." Whether fair or not, I think the fact that this word (parochial is a similar example) is used in a derogatory way indicates the general attitude. My theory is that "civilization" has a certain allure and people have trouble resisting it even though it's a mixed bag in a lot of ways.