> Since there’s no values in the set, never type can’t never (pun-intended) have any value
That’s not a pun that’s just poor grammar. “never type can never (pun-intended) have any value” makes sense.
That’s not a pun that’s just poor grammar. “never type can never (pun-intended) have any value” makes sense.
“All Options Are Not on the Table as Biden Moves Troops Closer to Ukraine” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/us/politics/biden-ukraine...
which should have been “Not All Options Are on the Table”, since the intended interpretation is
¬∀ option, on(option, table)
rather than the very different
∀ option, ¬on(option, table).
https://www.russiantutoring.com/post/double-negation-in-russ...
A professor is lecturing on linguistics: "In English a double negative has a positive meaning. However, in some languages—such as Russian—a double negative still has a negative meaning. There isn't, however, a language in which a double positive holds a negative meaning."
A student in the back responds: "Yeah, right."
There is no such thing as "poor grammar" --- it's a myth. Most of the grammatical "rules" we tend to be taught in primary and secondary school English courses were invented relatively recently, and they were created specifically for the purpose of establishing an arbitrary class distinction.
Now, there's something to be said about markedness [1]. If the majority of a specific group of speakers of a language find a particular utterance (phrase, sentence, pronunciation, etc) to stand out in a way that feels unnatural, then that utterance is called "marked". Clearly, "can't never" is marked in your perspective. (And, indeed, I also find it to be marked in my own dialect.)
However...
There do exist large groups of native English speakers for whom this utterance is not marked. In these groups, this is a regular way to emphasize a negative. So, in those groups, the utterance is unmarked.
So it is wrong to say that your notion of markedness is universal. Undoubtedly, there are utterances you would produce that members of other groups of native English speakers would find marked. (A simple example offhand: American English speakers find the British constructions of "go to hospital" or "to be on holiday" to be marked. Does that make these utterances ungrammatical universally? Absolutely not.)
Context is important. If you are writing, say, an academic paper that you want to publish at a particular venue, then you are expected to adhere to the grammatical conventions of that venue. But for general everyday speech? The rule is straightforward: if you understand the intent, then it is not incorrect. It might be marked for you, but that does not make it "wrong" or "bad" or "poor" universally.
But look at your own comment:
> Context is important. If you are writing, say, an academic paper that you want to publish at a particular venue, then you are expected to adhere to the grammatical conventions of that venue.
This is a technical blog post addressing a technical audience. In fact the sentence in question is explaining a technical concept. Therefore the (unwritten?) rules of technical writing apply.
So it's inappropriate here to give lection on linguistic relativism.
For the purposes of the article, its audience, and the particular sentence in question, this is poor grammar.
I disagree; it is a personal writing. If I write a blog post, I can use whatever grammatical constructions I like. I don't think there should be any expectation of a particular grammatical style in an individual's personal writings.
This was not a peer-reviewed article, nor was it submitted for publication at a specific venue. It was self-published on the internet.
I also see "poor grammar" from non-native speakers. Including me: Duolingo was correct today when it told be that I shouldn't use "tu es" as a French subjunctive. No native speaker would say that. I just couldn't hear that what I typed was different from "tu aies" -- though I should have known from context.
You're absolutely right that much of what people tag as "poor grammar" is in fact a different dialect. It's perfectly natural to them and the people around them, following a set of rules that they know but may never have written down. They may evolve from mistakes that become persistent and thus valid in context.
Speaking in the wrong register or dialect is an error of its own -- not a grammatical one, but a semiotic one.
Perhaps you were trying to write down what you heard? 99% of the time there is a single canonical translation from verbal to written and vice-versa; English speakers have trouble learning that for some reason.
If it had been Spanish, transcribing it would be easier. French mooshes a lot of things together, so that "es" and "aies" are both pronounced "eh".
That said, the specific example being cited from the original blog post is not considered marked in many native English dialects.
And, indeed, I believe that we should be less concerned with such labels even with non-native English speakers. Since English has effectively become the world's go-to language of international communication, we should seek to understand other people's intent rather than attempt to correct arbitrary (and, frankly, unimportant) artifacts in their grammatical constructions.
But my point is that people will use phrases like "grammatically incorrect" in casual conversation (far from any context of linguistics or any social science) to describe certain utterances, and there are cases where this is not unreasonable.
People have always strongly believed, and taught, things about their own languages and languages in general. They're not all wrong necessarily. But linguistics over the last like 80 years has produced some models that have incredible predictive and explanatory power, and are incompatible with a view of an objective "correct" or "best" or "standard" form of a language.
There have certainly been efforts to draw arbitrary distinctions between groups based on speech for a very long time, probably going almost as far back as language itself.
What I was referring to was specifically an effort rooted in a desire to use rules of Latin grammar to restrict constructions in English. This was a big thing relatively recently (likely sometime in the past 100-300 years). It is this movement from which we get rules like "never end a sentence with a proposition" or "don't split infinitives" --- those sorts of things.
Just because those particular rules are silly doesn't mean all linguistic prescription is wrong. Prescriptions that clarify the meaning and relational structures between concepts can be very helpful, and discriminate only against careless users of language.
Grammar poor not does if exist, this like having have conversations fun.
Is marked pronounced as two syllables, mar•ked, in the context of linguistics? I am guessing it would definitely be in British English[2].
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vrZpjr44c1w
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/dwo5gj/is_it_a...
Sorry for the poor source links, I only did a quick Google. Disclaimer: I am from New Zealand, and sometimes how we say things is special, and sometimes how I say things is even specialer.
Generally, when indicating we want to give an E that is normally silent its own syllable, we use the grave accent. E.g., for "marked" we would write "markèd".
At least in General American dialects, "marked" is rendered as /markt/ because of rules about vowel epenthesis and consonant voicing assimilation. /markd/ would indeed sound odd to the American ear, I think. But when you explicitly add the vowel back in, the voiceless /k/ no longer forces the /d/ to assimilate its voicing characteristic, so you get /'mar.ked/. (I am using informal IPA because I'm too lazy to go copy/paste the specific symbols, but in this context they would add little anyway.)
That's a very hefty accusation. Do you have any proof that "they were created specifically for the purpose of establishing an arbitrary class distinction"?
>Now, there's something to be said about markedness [1]. If the majority of a specific group of speakers of a language find a particular utterance (phrase, sentence, pronunciation, etc) to stand out in a way that feels unnatural, then that utterance is called "marked".
Also known as "poor grammar".
>There do exist large groups of native English speakers for whom this utterance is not marked. In these groups, this is a regular way to emphasize a negative. So, in those groups, the utterance is unmarked.
Yep, in those groups the utterance isn't considered poor grammar.
Apologies; you are correct that my assertion is overly strong. I should rather have said "although we can no longer ascertain for certain the purpose for which these rules were introduced, some believe the origin to be rooted in a desire for creating an arbitrary class distinction."
Many of the "rules" we were taught can be traced directly back to an ongoing movement in the relatively recent past (like within the last 100-300 years, I think) to regularize English according to Latin grammar. This includes rules like:
- never end a sentence with a preposition
- never begin a sentence with a conjunction
- never split an infinitive
But we can find literary examples breaking any of these rules going back further than the origins of the rules. The rules were made up by people who revered Latin and thought English ought to be more Latin-esque.
The correlation to class distinction comes from the fact that people who tended to study Latin and revered Latin in this manner were members of an aristocracy, theocracy, or similar upper class, and there are other instances of these groups' efforts to arbitrarily distinguish themselves as being distinct from and superior to other groups of people.
There are also more recent efforts in a similar vein, as well. For example, in the United States there is a dialect commonly practiced by Black people in certain areas called African American Vernacular English. This dialect has a number of characteristics that are frequently labeled as "uneducated" or constituting "poor grammar". Although it is not controversial to say that these characteristics are marked in General American dialects, the specific connotations of the labels are generally understood to be rooted in a desire to portray Black Americans as belonging to a lower class, regardless of each individual's actual socioeconomic status.
> Also known as "poor grammar".
No, markedness is not also known as "poor grammar". There is a huge distinction.
The notion of markedness is that, for some group of people, a given utterance will strike them as not being something they themselves would say. Markedness is always framed in terms of a cultural context, by which I mean that it is okay to say that Americans generally find the British "go on holiday" to be marked --- it sticks out in the American dialects. This is a subjective assessment.
But "poor grammar" specifically seeks to attribute a negative connotation to the utterance. It says suggest that people who construct such utterances are, somehow, uneducated, or else are outsiders. It says that they've done something that is objectively (not subjectively) incorrect or wrong.
> Yep, in those groups the utterance isn't considered poor grammar.
Not always. Again, the terms are distinct in intent.
I don't think most Americans would listen to an English person say "I will go on holiday" and call it "poor grammar". They might say "that sounds funny" or "I'd never say it that way" or whatever else, but I think most would not use a phrase with such a strongly negative connotation. Many Americans view people with English accents (specifically accents closer to Received Pronunciation, though others are included) as having increased intelligence or other intellectual merit, for whatever reason, and so they will avoid labeling the speech of such people to be "incorrect" or "wrong" or "bad"; they will instead simply label it as "different".
However, when many (especially white) Americans hear utterances like "I been going to the store" or "I done finished my homework" or "I ain't never seen such a thing", they will label those as "poor grammar". They are specifically making a negative assessment of such utterances.
But all the examples are considered equally marked in General American dialects.
So my desire to distinguish markedness from "poor grammar" is rooted in a desire to fight stigmatization. There is nothing inherently wrong with those latter examples I gave, especially because almost all native English speakers will understand their intents (at least generally) without issue.
You're completely ignoring that people do make mistakes and get corrected. There is nothing in the post you originally replied to implying that anyone is uneducated or an outsider - you're introducing that. "Poor grammar", "bad grammar" and "incorrect grammar" are interchangeable and aren't about class.
If I accidentally type "Eat I bread", it's incorrect grammar even if there happens to be some dialect somewhere where it is valid.
That's literally what the "poor" in "poor grammar" is doing, though. The phrase itself suggests that the speaker is lesser-than simply by virtue of not speaking in the same way as the listener would.
> If I accidentally type "Eat I bread", it's incorrect grammar even if there happens to be some dialect somewhere where it is valid.
It is not "incorrect". It is different. It is marked, maybe, for many native English speakers. But these are distinct things from "incorrect".
I do not understand how you can say "There might be a group somewhere where who find it valid, but I don't find it valid and therefore it is incorrect." Why is your personal dialect the one that determines correct/incorrect? If you are American, is it incorrect to say "to go on holiday"? If you are British, is it incorrect to say "Microsoft is going to X" instead of "Microsoft are going to X"?
The use of the terms "correct" and "incorrect" suggests that there exists a universal ground truth, and my whole point in this discussion is that no such ground truth exists. If there is no universal ground truth, then there can be no correct/incorrect. The only way to get around this is to establish a specific cultural context where a ground truth can be agreed upon (e.g., a style guide used by a particular publication venue). Otherwise, at best you can only say "I would not phrase it in that way", but you cannot say "that is incorrect."
No, the "poor grammar" is just meaning "grammar that is incorrect" - I assume you're claiming that the meaning involves the speaker being poor? If that's what you believe, then I doubt anyone will convince you otherwise.
> It is not "incorrect". It is different. It is marked, maybe, for many native English speakers. But these are distinct things from "incorrect".
Literally everyone in this thread is using "incorrect" and being understood by everyone, so I don't see that you have any ground for claiming that "incorrect" is incorrect.
And you're still entirely missing that some things can be mistakes.
The universal ground truth is the intersubjective understanding of language norms.
>The only way to get around this is to establish a specific cultural context where a ground truth can be agreed upon (e.g., a style guide used by a particular publication venue).
Yes, and such context exists. The main prestige dialect in the US is General American, all other dialects are marked geographically, culturally, professionally or in some other similar manner.
That sounds more believable. Some people believe that, and some people believe that moon landing wasn't real. Many languages like Spanish, French, Russian or Chinese are regulated on the national or even supranational level. That feels like a good thing and it shouldn't be discouraged just because some people believe in weird things.
>No, markedness is not also known as "poor grammar". There is a huge distinction. >But "poor grammar" specifically seeks to attribute a negative connotation to the utterance. It says suggest that people who construct such utterances are, somehow, uneducated, or else are outsiders. It says that they've done something that is objectively (not subjectively) incorrect or wrong.
Markedness is just as objective as poor grammar. It is all about a specific group of people in a specific time and place. As time changes so does grammar and what is consider poor.
>Not always. Again, the terms are distinct in intent.
Well, in the strict sense "markedness" has different meaning. The way you described more or less resembles poor grammar in most cases.
>I don't think most Americans would listen to an English person say "I will go on holiday" and call it "poor grammar". They might say "that sounds funny" or "I'd never say it that way" or whatever else, but I think most would not use a phrase with such a strongly negative connotation.
They probably understand that it is a standardized learned prestige dialect.
>So my desire to distinguish markedness from "poor grammar" is rooted in a desire to fight stigmatization. There is nothing inherently wrong with those latter examples I gave, especially because almost all native English speakers will understand their intents (at least generally) without issue.
Yes, I understand. Americans have a knee-jerk reaction against everything that feels a tiny bit racist. However propping up a single standardized language and discouragement of deviations is a path that most nation-states have embraced.