28-Oct-2006, 05:06
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| Banned | | Join Date: Aug 2006 Country: Canada
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 Re: Singular/plural- language decides
Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeNewYork  Does that include opinions about those things that you call "facts"?  | Come on Mike. You've admitted that yours is merely opinion/preference and personal taste? And, by your own admission, you're fine with that. CGEL
"Some prescriptivist works present rules that have no basis in the way the language is actually used by the majority of its native speakers, and are not even claimed to have any such basis. ...
Prescriptive works instantiating this kind of aesthetic authoritarianism provide no answer to such obvious questions [how language works] They simply assert that grammar dictates things, without supporting their claim from evidence. ...
If what is involved were a matter of taste, all evidence would be beside the point. But under the descriptivist viewpoint, grammar is not a matter of taste, nor of aesthetics.
Last edited by riverkid; 28-Oct-2006 at 19:44.
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