Why do people lie about level ?

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aokoye
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Re: Why do people lie about level ?

Postby aokoye » Fri Jun 23, 2017 4:52 am

Iversen wrote:I don't have Chomsky's Syntactic Structures in front of me, but as i recall it he referred to "a" native speaker without specifying that this speaker should fulfil any academic or social or geographical criteria. I took the liberty to assume that any native speaker of a certain language then would be qualified to divide sentences into grammatical and nongrammatical.

As for the rule that you can't have two determiners it is obviously only valid for some languages, not for others, and even in English where it is true in almost all cases there are a few exceptions. Even those who see grammars as normative instruments which should be used to teach people 'good' language habits will generally acknowledge such exceptions if some famous author have used them, but probably not if the culpable is a child in primary school or an old weirdo somewhere in the countryside. And the question is whether this fair.

For me as a descriptivist a grammatical rule is just a generalization made on the basis of empirical studies, but it is obvious that any serious grammarian will ignore some utterances because they obviously are errors. Asking a sensible native speaker of the language in question about dubious cases is just a practical way to solve such cases, besides being a convenient shortcut to filling out holes in the corpus or do experiments. It would however be naive to expect any such person to be totally honest (or aware) of his/her own occasional deviations from the norm.

And what consequences does this have for language learners? First and foremost to prepare them for the sad fact that their grammar doesn't tell them everything about a language, just as their dictionary doesn't contain each and every word they see or hear in the real world.
I think you're seeing disagreement in overarching themes from at least me and perhaps others where there is none.
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