[riverkid]

Originally Posted by 2006

People, including 'academics', can say and write anything they wish, but what is the virtue/logic of saying "The draft had been prepared Ann and myself".? Why invent something called "override reflexives"? It almost sounds like a deliberate effort to promote incorrect/nonstandard English. I guess academics have to write something, or else they are not being very academic.

Let me get this straight, 2006. You want ESLs and ENLs to follow your guidelines simply because you believe that you KNOW what correct English is. Is that what you're saying?

Originally Posted by 2006

We know that some believe there is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" English and that almost anything goes, but I don't believe that is the view of most people. Most people believe there are rules of correct English.

Another red herring. People who know how language works don't believe for a second, never have EVER thought that "anything goes". When I was ten years old and I knew intuitively that most of these prescriptions were pure crap, I still never thought for a moment that "anything goes".

"Most" people also once thought that the earth was flat. It isn't, I can assure you.

Read this, from the linguist, G Pullum, one of the authors of the CGEL.

And Anglika, as nice a person as you are, and I'm sure you're a gem but what you might use or not use has no relevance to what is language. And even at that, I'd wager that a transcript of your daily speech would surprise you a great deal. See Professor Pullum's remarks.

And none of the foregoing has anything to do with prescriptive claims about grammar, which are a whole different story. Prescriptivists claim that there are certain rules which have authority over us even if they are not respected as correctness conditions in the ordinary usage of anybody.

You can tell them, "All writers of English sometimes use pronouns that have genitive noun phrase determiners as antecedents; Shakespeare did; Churchill did; Queen Elizabeth does; you did in your last book, a dozen times" (see here and here for early Language Log posts on this); and they just say, "Well then, I must try even harder, because regardless of what anyone says or writes, the prohibition against genitive antecedents is valid and ought to be respected by all of us."

To prescriptivists of this sort, there is just nothing you can say, because they do not acknowledge any circumstances under which they might conceivably find that they are wrong about the language. If they believe infinitives shouldn't be split, it won't matter if you can show that every user of English on the planet has used split infinitives, they'll still say that nonetheless it's just wrong.

That's the opposite insanity to "anything that occurs is correct": it says "nothing that occurs is relevant". Both positions are completely nuts. But there is a rather more subtle position in the middle that isn't. That is the interesting and conceptually rather difficult truth that Zink does not perceive.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at January 26, 2005 12:49 PM

RK: [Bolded and underlined is my added emphasis]