Arrant Pedantry


Is Change Okay or Not?


















  1. Historical use
  2. Modern use
  3. Oral use
  4. Edited written use
  5. Unedited written use
  6. Use by literary greats
  7. Common use






Language, Logic, and Correctness


























Notes   [ + ]



Why Descriptivists Are Usage Liberals

Outside of linguistics, the people who care most about language tend to be prescriptivists—editors, writers, English teachers, and so on—while linguists and lexicographers are descriptivists. “Descriptive, not prescriptive!” is practically the linguist rallying cry. But we linguists have done a terrible job of explaining just what that means and why it matters. As I tried to explain in “What Descriptivism Is and Isn’t”, descriptivism is essentially just an interest in facts. That is, we make observations about what the language is rather than state opinions about how we’d like it to be.

Descriptivism is often cast as the opposite of prescriptivism, but they aren’t opposites at all. But no matter how many times we insist that “descriptivism isn’t ‘anything goes’”, people continue to believe that we’re all grammatical anarchists and linguistic relativists, declaring everything correct and saying that there’s no such thing as a grammatical error.

Part of the problem is that whenever you conceive of two approaches as opposing points of view, people will assume that they’re opposite in every regard. Prescriptivists generally believe that communication is important, that having a standard form of the language facilitates communication, and that we need to uphold the rules to maintain the standard. And what people often see is that linguists continually tear down the rules and say that they don’t really matter. The natural conclusion for many people is that linguists don’t care about maintaining the standard or supporting good communication—they want a linguistic free-for-all instead. Then descriptivists appear to be hypocrites for using the very standard they allegedly despise.

It’s true that many descriptivists oppose rules that they disagree with, but as I’ve said before, this isn’t really descriptivism—it’s anti-prescriptivism, for lack of a better term. (Not because it’s the opposite of prescriptivism, but because it often prescribes the opposite of what traditional linguistic prescriptivism does.) Just ask yourself how an anti-prescriptive sentiment like “There’s nothing wrong with singular they” is a description of linguistic fact.

So if that’s not descriptivism, then why do so many linguists have such liberal views on usage? What does being against traditional rules have to do with studying language? And how can linguists oppose rules and still be in favor of good communication and Standard English?

The answer, in a nutshell, is that we don’t think that the traditional rules have much to do with either good communication or Standard English. The reason why we think that is a little more complicated.

Linguists have had a hard time defining just what Standard English is, but there are several ideas that recur in attempts to define it. First, although Standard English can certainly be spoken, it is often conceived of as a written variety, especially in the minds of non-linguists. Second, it is generally more formal, making it appropriate for a wide range of serious topics. Third, it is educated, or rather, it is used by educated speakers. Fourth, it is supraregional, meaning that it is not tied to a specific region, as most dialects are, but that it can be used across an entire language area. And fifth, it is careful or edited. Notions of uniformity and prestige are often thrown into the mix as well.

Careful is a vague term, but it means that users of Standard English put some care into what they say or write. This is especially true of most published writing; the entire profession of editing is dedicated to putting care into the written word. So it’s tempting to say that following the rules is an important part of Standard English and that tearing down those rules tears down at least that part of Standard English.

But the more important point is that Standard English is ultimately rooted in the usage of actual speakers and writers. It’s not just that there no legislative body declaring what’s standard, but that there are no first principles from which we can deduce what’s standard. All languages are different, and they change over time, so how can we know what’s right or wrong except by looking at the evidence? This is what descriptivists try to do when discussing usage: look at the evidence from historical and current usage and draw meaningful conclusions about what’s right or wrong. (There are some logical problems with this, but I’ll address those another time.)

Let’s take singular they, for example. The evidence shows that it’s been in use for centuries not just by common folk or educated speakers but by well-respected writers from Geoffrey Chaucer to Jane Austen. The evidence also shows that it’s used in fairly predictable ways, generally to refer to indefinite pronouns or to nouns that don’t specify gender. Its use has not caused the grammar of English to collapse, and it seems like a rather felicitous solution to the gender-neutral pronoun problem. So at least from a dispassionate linguistic point of view, there is no problem with it.

From another point of view, though, there is something wrong with it: some people don’t like it. This is a social rather than a linguistic fact, but it’s a fact nonetheless. But this social fact arose because at some point someone declared—contrary to the linguistic facts—that singular they is a grammatical error that should be avoided. Here’s where descriptivists depart from description and get into anti-prescription. If people have been taught to dislike this usage, it stands to reason that they could be taught to get over this dislike.

That is, linguists are engaging in anti-prescriptivism to counter the prescriptivism that isn’t rooted in linguistic fact. So when they debunk or tear down traditional rules, it’s not that they don’t value Standard English or good communication; it’s that they think that those particular rules have nothing to do with either.

To be fair, I think that many linguists think they’re still merely describing when they’re countering prescriptive attitudes. Saying that singular they has been used for centuries by respected writers, that it appears to follow fairly well-defined rules, and that the proscription against it is not based in linguistic fact is descriptive; saying that people need to get over their dislike and accept it is not.

And this is precisely why I think descriptivism and prescriptivism not only can but should coexist. It’s not wrong to have opinions on what’s right or wrong, but I think it’s better if those opinions have some basis in fact. Guidance on issues of usage can really only be relevant and valid if it takes all the evidence into account—who uses a certain word of construction, in what circumstances, and so on. These are all facts that can be investigated, and linguistics provides a solid methodological framework for doing so. Anything that ignores the facts reduces to one sort of ipse dixit or another, either a statement from an authority declaring something to be right or wrong or one’s own preferences or pet peeves.

Linguists value good communication, and we recognize the importance of Standard English. But our opinions on both are informed by our study of language and by our emphasis on facts and evidence. This isn’t “anything goes”, or at least no more so than language has always been. People have always worried about language change, but language has always turned out fine. Inventing new rules to try to regulate language will not save it from destruction, and tossing out the rules that have no basis in fact will not hasten the language’s demise. But recognizing that some rules don’t matter may alleviate some of those worries, and I think that’s a good thing for both camps.


Lynne Truss and Chicken Little









HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!





My Thesis














Relative Pronoun Redux

















Relative What








Notes   [ + ]



What Descriptivism Is and Isn’t

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker published what is nominally a review of Henry Hitchings’ book The Language Wars (which I still have not read but have been meaning to) but which was really more of a thinly veiled attack on what its author, Joan Acocella, sees as the moral and intellectual failings of linguistic descriptivism. In what John McIntyre called “a bad week for Joan Acocella”, the whole mess was addressed multiple times by various bloggers and other writers.* I wanted to write about it at the time but was too busy, but then the New Yorker did me a favor by publishing a follow-up, “Inescapably, You’re Judged by Your Language”, which was equally off-base, so I figured that the door was still open.

I suspected from the first paragraph that Acocella’s article was headed for trouble, and the second paragraph quickly confirmed it. For starters, her brief description of the history and nature of English sounds like it’s based more on folklore than fact. A lot of people lived in Great Britain before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and their linguistic contributions were effectively nil. But that’s relatively small stuff. The real problem is that she doesn’t really understand what descriptivism is, and she doesn’t understand that she doesn’t understand, so she spends the next five pages tilting at windmills.

Acocella says that descriptivists “felt that all we could legitimately do in discussing language was to say what the current practice was.” This statement is far too narrow, and not only because it completely leaves out historical linguistics. As a linguist, I think it’s odd to describe linguistics as merely saying what the current practice is, since it makes it sound as though all linguists study is usage. Do psycholinguists say what the current practice is when they do eye-tracking studies or other psychological experiments? Do phonologists or syntacticians say what the current practice is when they devise abstract systems of ordered rules to describe the phonological or syntactic system of a language? What about experts in translation or first-language acquisition or computational linguistics? Obviously there’s far more to linguistics than simply saying what the current practice is.

But when it does come to describing usage, we linguists love facts and complexity. We’re less interested in declaring what’s correct or incorrect than we are in uncovering all the nitty-gritty details. It is true, though, that many linguists are at least a little antipathetic to prescriptivism, but not without justification. Because we linguists tend to deal in facts, we take a rather dim view of claims about language that don’t appear to be based in fact, and, by extension, of the people who make those claims. And because many prescriptions make assertions that are based in faulty assumptions or spurious facts, some linguists become skeptical or even hostile to the whole enterprise.

But it’s important to note that this hostility is not actually descriptivism. It’s also, in my experience, not nearly as common as a lot of prescriptivists seem to assume. I think most linguists don’t really care about prescriptivism unless they’re dealing with an officious copyeditor on a manuscript. It’s true that some linguists do spend a fair amount of effort attacking prescriptivism in general, but again, this is not actually descriptivism; it’s simply anti-prescriptivism.

Some other linguists (and some prescriptivists) argue for a more empirical basis for prescriptions, but this isn’t actually descriptivism either. As Language Log’s Mark Liberman argued here, it’s just prescribing on the basis of evidence rather than person taste, intuition, tradition, or peevery.

Of course, all of this is not to say that descriptivists don’t believe in rules, despite what the New Yorker writers think. Even the most anti-prescriptivist linguist still believes in rules, but not necessarily the kind that most people think of. Many of the rules that linguists talk about are rather abstract schematics that bear no resemblance to the rules that prescriptivists talk about. For example, here’s a rather simple one, the rule describing intervocalic alveolar flapping (in a nutshell, the process by which a word like latter comes to sound like ladder) in some dialects of English:

intervocalic alveolar flapping

Rules like these constitute the vast bulk of the language, though they’re largely subconscious and unseen, like a sort of linguistic dark matter. The entire canon of prescriptions (my advisor has identified at least 10,000 distinct prescriptive rules in various handbooks, though only a fraction of these are repeated) seems rather peripheral and inconsequential to most linguists, which is another reason why we get annoyed when prescriptivists insist on their importance or identify standard English with them. Despite what most people think, standard English is not really defined by prescriptive rules, which makes it somewhat disingenuous and ironic for prescriptivists to call us hypocrites for writing in standard English.

If there’s anything disingenuous about linguists’ belief in rules, it’s that we’re not always clear about what kinds of rules we’re talking about. It’s easy to say that we believe in the rules of standard English and good communication and whatnot, but we’re often pretty vague about just what exactly those rules are. But that’s probably a topic for another day.

*A roundup of some of the posts on the recent brouhaha:

Cheap Shot”, “A Bad Week for Joan Acocella”, “Daddy, Are Prescriptivists Real?”, and “Unmourned: The Queen’s English Society” by John McIntyre

Rules and Rules” and “A Half Century of Usage Denialism” by Mark Liberman

Descriptivists as Hypocrites (Again)” by Jan Freeman

Ignorant Blathering at The New Yorker”, by Stephen Dodson, aka Languagehat

Re: The Language Wars” and “False Fronts in the Language Wars” by Steven Pinker

The New Yorker versus the Descriptivist Specter” by Ben Zimmer

Speaking Truth about Power” by Nancy Friedman

Sator Resartus” by Ben Yagoda

I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed. If you know of any more, feel free to make note of them in the comments.


Rules, Evidence, and Grammar

In case you haven’t heard, it’s National Grammar Day, and that seemed as good a time as any to reflect a little on the role of evidence in discussing grammar rules. (Goofy at Bradshaw of the Future apparently had the same idea.) A couple of months ago, Geoffrey Pullum made the argument in this post on Lingua Franca that it’s impossible to talk about what’s right or wrong in language without considering the evidence. Is singular they grammatical and standard? How do you know?

For most people, I think, the answer is pretty simple: you look it up in a source that you trust. If the source says it’s grammatical or correct, it is. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. Singular they is wrong because many authoritative sources say it is. End of story. And if you try to argue that the sources aren’t valid or reliable, you’re labelled an anything-goes type who believes we should just toss all the rules out the window and embrace linguistic anarchy.

The question is, where did these sources get their authority to say what’s right and wrong?

That is, when someone says that you should never use they as a singular pronoun or start a sentence with hopefully or use less with count nouns, why do you suppose that the rules they put forth are valid? The rules obviously haven’t been inscribed on stone tablets by the finger of the Lord, but they have to come from somewhere. Every language is different, and languages and constantly changing, so I think we have to recognize that there is no universal, objective truth when it comes to grammar and usage.

David Foster Wallace apparently fell into the trap of thinking that there was, unfortunately. In his famous Harper’s article “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” he quotes the introduction to The American College Dictionary, which says, “A dictionary can be an ‘authority’ only in the sense in which a book of chemistry or of physics or of botany can be an ‘authority’: by the accuracy and the completeness of its record of the observed facts of the field examined, in accord with the latest principles and techniques of the particular science.”

He retorts,

This is so stupid it practically drools. An “authoritative” physics text presents the results of physicists’ observations and physicists’ theories about those observations. If a physics textbook operated on Descriptivist principles, the fact that some Americans believe that electricity flows better downhill (based on the observed fact that power lines tend to run high above the homes they serve) would require the Electricity Flows Better Downhill Theory to be included as a “valid” theory in the textbook—just as, for Dr. Fries, if some Americans use infer for imply, the use becomes an ipso facto “valid” part of the language.

The irony of his first sentence is almost overwhelming. Physics is a set of universal laws that can be observed and tested, and electricity works regardless of what anyone believes. Language, on the other hand, is quite different. In fact, Wallace tacitly acknowledges the difference—without explaining his apparent contradiction—immediately after: “It isn’t scientific phenomena they’re tabulating but rather a set of human behaviors, and a lot of human behaviors are—to be blunt—moronic. Try, for instance, to imagine an ‘authoritative’ ethics textbook whose principles were based on what most people actually do.”1David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” Harper’s Monthly, April 2001, 47.

Now here he hits on an interesting question. Any argument about right or wrong in language ultimately comes down to one of two options: it’s wrong because it’s absolutely, objectively wrong, or it’s wrong because arbitrary societal convention says it’s wrong. The former is untenable, but the latter doesn’t give us any straightforward answers. If there is no objective truth in usage, then how do we know what’s right and wrong?

Wallace tries to make the argument about ethics; sloppy language leads to real problems like people accidentally eating poison mushrooms. But look at his gargantuan list of peeves and shibboleths on the first page of the article. How many of them lead to real ethical problems? Does singular they pose any kind of ethical problem? What about sentential hopefully or less with count nouns? I don’t think so.

So if there’s no ethical problem with disputed usage, then we’re still left with the question, what makes it wrong? Here we get back to Pullum’s attempt to answer the question: let’s look at the evidence. And, because we can admit, like Wallace, that some people’s behavior is moronic, let’s limit ourselves to looking at the evidence from those speakers and writers whose language can be said to be most standard. What we find even then is that a lot of the usage and grammar rules that have been put forth, from Bishop Robert Lowth to Strunk and White to Bryan Garner, don’t jibe with actual usage.

Edward Finegan seizes on this discrepancy in an article a few years back. In discussing sentential hopefully, he quotes Garner as saying that it is “all but ubiquitous—even in legal print. Even so, the word received so much negative attention in the 1970s and 1980s that many writers have blacklisted it, so using it at all today is a precarious venture. Indeed, careful writers and speakers avoid the word even in its traditional sense, for they’re likely to be misunderstood if they use it in the old sense”2”Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Finegan says, “I could not help but wonder how a reflective and careful analyst could concede that hopefully is all but ubiquitous in legal print and claim in the same breath that careful writers and speakers avoid using it.”3Edward Finegan, “Linguistic Prescription: Familiar Practices and New Perspectives,” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2003) 23, 216.

The problem when you start questioning the received wisdom on grammar and usage is that you make a lot of people very angry. In a recent conversation on Twitter, Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, said, “You would not believe (or maybe you would) how much grief I’m getting for saying ‘data’ can sometimes be singular.” I responded, “Sadly, I can. For some people, grammar is more about cherished beliefs than facts, and they don’t like having them challenged.” They don’t want to hear arguments about authority and evidence and deriving rules from what educated speakers actually use. They want to believe that there’s some deeper truths that justify their preferences and peeves, and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon. But for now, I’ll keep trying.

Notes   [ + ]



More on That













Notes   [ + ]

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