Ill-founded arguments about grammar
motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com
motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com
When push comes to shove and you need to actually decide what your assumption is, you're going to assume something, it may at least have the best possible shot at being accurate.
Even Jeff Foxworthy would often joke that he wouldn't want to be operated on by someone who talks like he does.
A large part of rhetoric, for example, is breaking grammar for effect.
Those words are powerful, but not because they form a comma splice. That is, their power does not derive from failing the model's rules. Rather, the model's rules fail to capture that those words are powerful. (Or even allowed.)
Again, grammar is a model. A model that people don't actually use to communicate with one another. Nobody hears words and constructs a parse tree to figure out what they mean. So what's encoded in the model (or not) has little effect on the effect that the words actually have.
Change the model all you want. Nobody will hear any differently.
EDIT: P.S. When I wrote that rhetoric was "breaking grammar for effect," I didn't mean to imply that the effect of rhetoric came from breaking grammar. Rather, I meant that the focus in rhetoric is on the effect and, because grammar fails to admit many effective phrasings, rhetoric necessarily "breaks grammar" from the outset.
That is, there is no "rule set" in reality. Nevertheless, you can create a rule set that describes some of reality. Just don't start thinking it's the real thing.
I offered a sentence in English and made the claims that (1) it was powerful and (2) not admitted by the grammars that govern such constructions. I thought that these were necessary and sufficient to make my point.
Do you believe that either of these claims is false (or somehow depends on what's true or false for Latin)?
Thanks for your help!
Here's one from English, in honor of the upcoming holiday:
Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
As far as your claims, (2) is contentious. Some grammars rail against the evils of the comma splice, others acknowledge its place and provide more nuanced guidelines for proper use. It's never been a cut-and-dried issue. I personally disagree with (1) for English while agreeing with it for Latin, but that is neither here nor there.
That means "more anything can mean anything descriptivist nonsense." Please let me know when your model has been adjusted.
Perhaps when you stop having to explain what it means? :)
Prescriptivists usually go beyond the dictionary to enforce ideas of language that they got using the problematic methods described in the linked article.
Not quite. Merely being understood isn't the only possible goal of human language. Usually, speakers also want to appear educated and reliable, and using grammatical rules that the largest possible portion of your audience agrees with is a good way to do that.
Edit: Spelling
Some of them, yes. A great many are not. Taking your "last year" to be poetic rather than literal: -gate is cliche, "meme" is totally a thing now, "my bad" has diffused into informal communication all over Anglophonia, lolcat-speak still has everybody's great-aunt snorting at her Facebook wall, texting acronyms are well-known to everyone, word truncation + s is on its way to becoming totes ubiqs, etc.
Not to mention you're using a pretty useless definition of "outdated" if it includes literally everything.
ding ding ding, you're starting to get it!
More seriously, language can be thought of as a middle ground between production of an external symbol as a realization of thought, and interpretation of that symbol in another mind.
Even using language adhering to the strictest of grammars, there can be room for misunderstanding in the mind of the interpreter as they will be decoding your symbol expressions through a lens of their own understanding. Adhering to the model you think best does not guarantee clarity of communication!
You adjust the production model you use in order to better suit the interpretation model your audience is using. If your use of language is skillful enough, you can even help the audience select from several competing language models in order to add nuance -- you can speak in a vernacular or in a formal mode.
"language is not a logical system" -_communication_ is not a logical system, but language is.
Care to explain this?
From most NLP classes I have taken and work I have done, I have always understood that languages are logical only in a very loose sense of that word. It is pretty hard to express grammar systems in formal logic for most practical human languages as far as I know.
Maybe I am missing something?
I'm not sure what you mean. More specifically, what logical underpinnings does language have that communication doesn't? For me, communication is the transfer of ideas from one brain to another, and I would define language as the means of doing so. So you can't have one without the other.
"The method must be logical in its formation because otherwise it can't be sure it is understood by both parties."
Isn't true in any description of language. You can't be 0/1 sure that language will be understood by both parties. You can only make a guess that probably the way I'm producing communication symbols will probably be understood by the receiver. If the probabilities align, then communication has succeeded...but a 1:1 production-to-understanding ratio almost never happens.
Receivers of communication understand some percentage less than 100% every time. But it's their own internal models of the language that let's them fill in the gaps. You as a communication producer hope that they are filling in the gaps with a model that's close enough to your model that everything works. And for the most part it does, we're pretty good at it, but miscommunication occurs dozens of times a day, every day for every daily set of communication events.
> The method must be logical in its formation because otherwise it can't be sure it is understood by both parties.
Again I don't know what you mean by "logical". Logic is universal and absolute and doesn't change. But while languages each have an internal consistency, they're all very different from each other, and each of them evolves quite drastically given enough time.
How could language have ever developed if it needed to be logical for it to be understood? Seems to me all you need is a bit of empathy and some dexterous body parts (fingers/arms, vocal cords/tongue) to build a real language starting from pointing and gesturing and grunting, none of which is at all systematic.
Over time, I think modern languages developed that internal consistency because their users needed to express more and more complicated ideas. If the idea I'm conveying to you has lots of actors and actions and nuanced imagery in it, things have to be orderly and highly patterned-based or else I know that you will not understand. So we all mutually agreed on an arbitrary system for these things.