There is so much to learn about language. It is the most complex thing we will ever do as humans and the prescriptive notions that fly around sites like this demean language and its users and seriously mislead the ESLs who seek guidance here.
Corpus based studies have shown clearly just how unhelpful prescriptive grammar has been.
Quote:
The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English
... one of the most important uses of corpus-based investigation is to provide information about frequency of use. Teachers, students, materials writers, and those with a purely academic interest will all find it useful to know which grammatical patterns are common and which are rare. Hitherto, this information has been based on native-speaker intuition. However, native speakers rarely have accurate perceptions of these differences: a large representative corpus, ... is the only source of frequency information.
When it comes to describing differences across registers, native-speaker intuition is even less reliable.
... supposedly colloquial, inexplicit grammatical features sometimes turn out to be common in formal academic writing.
|