echidna

Does Harbrace mention the penalty for failing to follow their rules ?

echidna

Groovy Cosmic Monkey, it’s an excellent question & I really should have given your question more thought earlier so I’ll try & make amends here.

The way we speak is maybe one of the most important parts of our identity. Language, accent, syntax & vocabulary all go together to identify us with a group – Australian / Cambodian, recent immigrant / fourth generation, city / country, working class / educated middle class, Greek Australian / Chinese Australian, Victorian / Queenslander.

Just as we make generalisations from appearance, so we also take shortcuts by hearing how a person speaks. A slow country drawl might indicate that a conversation about the footy might be welcomed, or Mediterranean gestures might prompt one to ask if the person is Italian. And hearing a working class accent might indicate that the person may not be too familiar with a conversation regarding the latest ballet in town.

Prejudice literally means pre-judging. Yes, I think we are fully entitled to pre-judge, it’s an essential part of living. But what is critical in any generalisation is to realise the limitations, that the generalisation may be false, that there are varying exceptions to pre-judgements, & that one may well have made an error. The pre-judgement is only a loose indicator & depending on the severity of the pre-judgement (is the person a mugger just because they have a working class accent ?), then additional evidence must be found to support the pre-judgement.

Let’s not assume that linguistic prejudice works only one way either. Margaret Thatcher, QEII & our foreign minister Alexander Downer have all needed to respond to criticism of their upper class accents (encompassing their vocab & sentence structure), that it made them too distant from the general population, that as leaders their populations would be prejudiced against the way they spoke.

Another issue regarding linguistic relativity is over how we regard our own Australian-English language. The last to decades have seen significant shift in teaching policy with regards English. No longer is grammar, spelling, syntax ruthlessly marked. Official Education Department policy (at least here in Victoria) is that poor grammar, spelling, syntax cannot be marked down, unless it is to a point where it impedes the student’s message being understood.

And the changes have been noticeable. Spelling & grammar amongst younger generations (mine is worse than both my parent’s) is arguably atrocious. Often it is difficult to understand, there are occasions where confusing “their” & “there” causes annoying moments of frustration. Yes, likely much of this attitude comes from my own snobbishness, that somewhere it likely reflects a laziness in the teaching profession, but at the same time it also demonstrates that people are being taught English at a lower level, that restricts many from understanding many works of literature, as well as official documents which they need to understand in life, that the benefits of reading are in part being devalued. [run-on sentence reflecting poor syntax]

But at the end of all that, strewth, stuffed if I really give a toss. Melbourne’s mix of languages & accents is a large part of its appeal for me.

nermal

You're right, there is no such rule, but someone did make it up. His name was Love; he was a reverend in the mid 19th century; he was also a self proscribed English authority. And this wasn't the only case in which he screwed up English education for generations to come.

Ed

enfant terrible

This could be used as an argument for a firm standard and for rigorous teaching of that standard. Maybe it would make usurping the authority more difficult for such quacks.

Groovy Cosmic Monkey

I pretty much agree. The problem is, non-standard ways of speaking are considered by many not simply to be an error in standard English, but rather an error in English itself, which it is not. It may be considered inappopriate to use double negatives in certain contexts, such as a piece of academic writing; but many people tend to extend "inappropriateness" to "incorrectness" and extend "in certain contexts" to "in pretty much all contexts". These extensions are more powerful and damaging to one's social/ethnic group than they may perhaps seem.

Yes it is. Standard English developed out of the London dialect and it is merely a historical coincidence, not linguistic superiority, that it developed into the Standard. It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy - this may be a cute way of putting it, but saying that Standard English is not a dialect simply works to reinforce the idea that it is superior to Non-Standard speech, even if it is indeed more appropriate in certain contexts.

Indeed, and I'm not advocating giving up a standard. I simply think people should be more careful when choosing to make value judgements on people's way of speaking. We seem to have fewer differences than I at first thought, because you seem to admit that anything which smacks of moral or value judgements on people's use of language has no place in linguistics.

It is these value judgements that I'm advocating eradicating. Unfortunately, these value judgements arise from the belief that Standard English is the only correct or pure form of the language. As a corollary, of course any other way of speaking is incorrect and corrupted. If we are to largely eradicate value judgements, we would also have to eradicate our belief in the inherent superiority of Standard English.

This does not mean we are doing away with any standard whatsoever, or that we don't recognise levels of appropriateness in certain contexts; it simply means we recognise that language is used for communication and for solidarity - if a way of speaking allows for communication and creates solidarity, we shouldn't make value judgements on it.

Exactly, such judgements are useless in my opinion. I was simply pointing out that Non-Standard dialects are no more linguistically deprived that Standard English is, and in some cases Standard English is missing out on intricate features of language that the Non-Standard dialects have. As such, there are no grounds for claiming that the Standard is superior, even if it is spoken by the higher class in society.

Well, I would understand "y'all", but this depends on who you're trying to communicate with (or with whom you're trying to communicate ). I don't know any Australian who wouldn't understand "youse," and in fact English speakers are probably more likely to misunderstand someone if they say "you" and no one can be sure whether they meant "you" in the singular or plural form. This seems like an impediment to effective communication to me.

Yes, but regardless of what other languages do, in English everyone understands when someone says "I don't want nothin' to drink".

Indeed, if you want to be understood by the widest range of people possible, you would write or speak using the Standard dialect.

Basically, my contention is that making value judgements on people's way of speaking as "lazy" or "corrupted" or whatever is prejudicial. These value judgements arise from a belief that Standard English is the only correct and pure form of English, which implies that Non-Standard dialects are incorrect and corrupted. In order to wipe out the prejudice I identified, it is necessary to remove the idea that Standard English is the superior English.

It is possible to say "Standard English is the most widespread way of speaking and therefore you should use it in academic writing" while still recognising that Non-Standard English is fine.



Well, linguists won't tell you that Standard English is superior to Non-Standard English, even if it is more widespread.

Once again, the point is really to adopt a descriptive rather than prescriptive way of viewing language. Rather than insisting on a certain way of speaking, a descriptivist method would look at what people actually do say. If we look at what people do say, and realise that Standard English is most common, we logically arrive at the conclusion that Standard English would be more appropriate in certain context. We do not arrive at the conclusion that Standard English is "correct" or "superior" just because most people use it. The prescriptivist method, however, would reach such conclusions.

How do we decide what is and isn't a genuine rule then? Are we allowed to split infinitives? Can we use "less" rather than "fewer" when we're referring to count nouns eg. "less people"? Can we say "who" rather than "whom" for the direct object?

Groovy Cosmic Monkey

echidna,

Why thank you .

Exactly. This is why I think it's important to be careful when we make value judgements on the correctness of people's way of speaking.

Indeed, for some reason Alexander Downer seems to insist on enunciating every single syllable with precision.

I think it's sad that grammar has been erased from the English syllabus. And one of my linguistics lecturers agreed. It's interesting to note the difference between the type of grammar you learn in linguistics as opposed to the type of grammar you'd expect to learn in school, however. Rather than learning what you should and shouldn't say, I learnt about word classes, syntactic trees, discourse strategies, and all sorts of weird and wonderful things that have no relationship to how we "should" or "shouldn't" speak as "correct" English users.

I totally agree, and this is precisely why anyone who adopts an "anything goes" attitude to linguistics is wrong.

Exactly. I used to cringe when I heard someone say "youse" but now I find it slipping into my own speech. Language can be beautiful and rich. Enforcing a monolithic Standard and pointless grammar "rules" can often serve to make language boring and to impede change.

enfant terrible

GCM,

It seems to me that we live in countries with too different cultural traditions to fully understand each other's position. From the North American perspective, your talk about value judgment against people who speak non-standard English seems unreal. The closest it could get to that is that someone speaking like most Blacks do may trigger reactions based on the listener's racial prejudices. But dialect (accent) is just a proxy for race in that case. On the other hand, I've heard that in England speech is closely associated with socioeconomic class. British movies provide plenty of examples; I can barely understand some of them. I don't know what the predominant views are in Australia, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were much closer to British than to American views. But then we have a very different set of problems.

In the US and Canada, most people speak reasonably close to the standard (which, of course, is a very different standard from yours), but most highly educated people make almost as many mistakes as the least educated. I am often appalled at the language skills of college students and professionals. And I am not talking about people who grew up in poverty or with other hardship, but middle-class suburban kids.

Alonzo Fyfe

The purpose of language is communication. I evaluate the rules of grammar according to whether they contribute to communication.

Toward this end, some rules are to be obeyed, such as the rule for subject/verb agreement. The statement, "He are going to the movies," does not communicate clearly. Such a statement is incoherent -- internally inconsistent. We now do not know if the speaker meant to say "He is . . ." or "They are . . .".

However, we have many rules that do not aid communication at all. The rules exist 'just because'. I actually believe that it is a waste of time to promote 'just because' rules when, instead, we can be spending that time focusing on items that would actually benefit communication. For example, where time can be spent improving one's spelling or one's vocabulary, the former pales in significance compared to the latter. The former is a waste of time, the latter is not.

We even have some rules that promote ambiguity and miscommunication. For example, American english has a rule whereby all punctuation is to show up inside of the quotation marks, independent of whether it was actually a part of the phrase being quoted. This is a rule that I consciously ignore, and I care nothing for the complaints and criticisms of others.

Another example, drawn from some of the conversation above, is the distinction between "you" and "yous" or "y'all" already mentioned above. Such a distinction would aid communication by allowing speakers to distinguish "you - singular" from "you-plural". Right now, using standard english, this term is ambiguous. Which means it is confusing, and promotes miscommunication. Fighting for conformity to this rule and criticizing those who use a plural 'you' is to fight against language serving its purpose.

The Other Michael

Here's a fine bit of ambiguous speech.

If cream is soaked into a sponge, it is the sponge that provides the matrix holding the cream - the cream doesn't bind the sponge together.

But I suppose if they are referring to a (pastry) cream being used as the filler between two slabs of sponge (cake), then the cream can be seen to bind the cake together. This sounds like they are using terms from a local dialect.

The second interpretation depends upon a knowledge of the local dialect, where the first should be (IMO) the way a person speaking standard English would tend to interpret the statement.

I think that "rules" of speech and standard definitions of words do often have some purpose in that they give a common base that everyone can use to parse a sentence and come to some agreement about just what the sentence is attempting to say.

The standardness of a person's speech is a function of education/indoctrination, and is not necessarily an indication of the person's intelligence (much less their moral fiber). But stereotyping is the way a lot of people get through the day, and while it can certainly lead to an incorrect conclusion it often is a satisfactory way of dealing with commonplace issues of life.

cheers,
Michael