Re: The definition of the Standard variation of British English

Eric Walker <email@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:39:29 -0700, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:

[...]

The problem is that that's almost exactly backwards. Dictionaries
and other grammar books attempt to describe Standard English, but
Standard English isn't written according to the rules given in the
books. . . .

We have had this conversation before. It much depends on whose
writings you are reading. I would say that there is a substantial
body of writers, most or all well respected, whose prose uniformly
conforms to what the classic standard manuals of grammar and usage
would call "standard" English (and, correspondingly, very few who to
any large degree breach that standard).

Obviously, not all good writers will _exactly_ agree in their forms,
nor will even all classic standard manuals of grammar and usage; but
I submit that the topics exhibiting variance are very few, and the
range of disagreement over each typically quite narrow. Even good
writers may use "but" conjunctively ("whence all but he had fled")
while others will disdain the construction; but precious few, if
any, will use "they" as a singular pronoun. Putting it graphically,
a snapshot of "standard English" will not be crystal sharp, but
neither will it be particularly fuzzy.

I don't actually disagree with most of that, except that I've seen
singular "they" in enough (edited) published works and heard it from
enough educated speakers speaking formally that I think that it has,
recently, become an accepted part of the standard, even if it hasn't
risen to the point of being actively taught in schools.

But as this implies, there's a time lag involved. The books "good"
writers conform to were written, typically, decades before and
attempted to capture what the standard dialect was considered to be
then (both what it actually was and what the particular writers
thought it should be when they didn't like particular ways speakers
and writers actually spoke and wrote).

But as I've said elsethread, what makes the standard dialect useful is
that most speakers (even those who can't actually use it well for
production) will tend to agree on the acceptability or unacceptability
for it of the vast majority of actually produced sentences and will be
able to identify the problem when there is one. It's the fuzzy corner
cases, where people's conceptions of the standard differ or where they
don't actually describe the way it is used that cause disagreements.
Of course, those are the ones that tend to be brought up, especially
in a forum like this.

It just is, based on the internalization of native speakers who
have been taught it and have encountered it, often *not* as their
first dialect.

I find the statement "it just is" remarkable. If it "is", then it
can be recorded; if it cannot be recorded, then "it just is not".
(Granted the proviso above about occasional minor niggles.)

I find the assertion that "If it 'is', then it can be recorded"
remarkable. It's in the brain. Somehow. We can't just look inside
and read it off. All we can do is look at what people actually
produce, how they make mistakes (and don't), how they misunderstand
one another, and how they respond when we ask for grammaticality
judgments, and try to build models that behave the same way.

And we don't even know what sort of thing it is. Twenty-odd years
ago, when I was a linguistics student at Stanford, there was a lot of
work trying to build such models. None of them looked anything like
anything you're likely to find in any elementary-school classroom or
grammar book. (They were both simpler--HPSG, the formalism I mostly
worked on, only had a couple of universal rules and maybe half a dozen
language-specific ones--and more complex, since there was no bias that
people had to be able to learn the model by reading a description of
it, and the complexity of description led to more straightforward
models.)

As I have observed before, the development of standard English,
which necessarily began once rapid movement and wide distribution of
information became commonplace, is a feedback process: the manual
makers observe what those considered careful and polished language
users say and write, and record it (description); careful and
polished users consult such manuals to see what the consensus of
their peers is on various matters, and usually then conform their
own uses, if they were variant, to the perceived norms
(prescription). Then another such cycle proceeds, and on and on,
the variations in the field becoming ever smaller.

Yes, to a point. The problem with that is that there is always input
from other dialects and other languages. There are always fads, and
while most of most of them die, some of some of them leave their mark,
either in vocabulary or in constructions that are now considered
acceptable. Non-native speakers or native speakers who sometimes
speak in "folksy" dialect (often, for effect) become popular and are
quoted and their speech seems "cute" and then people forget that it's
"wrong". And so on.

In the ordinary course of things, that process would lead to a
virtually rock-solid and nearly invariant concept of "standard", and
I reckon it was on its way there throughout the first half to
two-thirds of the twentieth century. The, for reasons not to be
tackled here, the "whatever" movement arose and defied the very
concept of regular--that is, rule-bound--behavior, in many fields,
not just language use. So attractive, for obvious reasons, is the
doctrine that no one need trouble to learn or observe rules because
there aren't any that the progress of regularization in English has
been nearly stalled (and, arguably, set back--and for that matter it
is far from just language use that has suffered from that attitude).

Ye knowe ek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thenketh hem, and yet they spake hem so
And spedde as wel in love as men now do.

I would be very surprised if you couldn't find commentators giving
essentially your argument every quarter century back at least to Swift
at the turn of the eighteenth. Things were going fine up until about
fifty years ago, but then people stopped caring about the rules and
now look at what's happened! And I'll bet that they'll be saying it
fifty years from now.

They can treat grammar books and dictionaries as guides, and as
non-native speakers, they'll typically get a fair amount of leeway
with an explanation of "That's what I was taught" when one of the
rules they follow turns out not to be a good one. But they should
be prepared to hear from native speakers that much of what they
learn may well be out of date, vastly oversimplified, or just plain
wrong. . . .

And, as with any source, whether about language use or quantum
physics, they should examine with care what they are told, and
compare it to what is said by other authorities of comparable or
greater expertise. Forms that, say, Mickey Spillane might use would
not, to me, weigh so much in any attempts to identify standard
English as, say, forms used by Iris Murdoch.

I don't know that I would make a distinction, if I were reading
something Mickey Spillane wrote that was intended to be written in
Standard English. His novels were not, consciously, but I have no
reason to believe that he couldn't and didn't. Obviously, taking
something written in a non-standard dialect as an example of the
standard would be a mistake.

Even large numbers of native speakers can be in error about some
matter. Till (for example) the day when "men prefers" is an
unexceptionable form in English, the casting "he is one of those men
who prefers work over play" is non-standard English, regardless of
whether 97% of native speakers cast it that way.

And that's where we disagree. For me, the fact that "men prefers" is
judged ungrammatical but "he is one of those men who prefers work over
play" is not means that any model that implies that it need be is
simply not describing the language correctly . My guess is that it's
being cast, internally, as something akin to "he is one ... who
prefers" rather than "he is among those men who prefer".

--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
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