[rewboss]

Originally Posted by riverkid

I believe that it would be my perogative to raise what I believe is pertinent. It's always relevant to expose prescriptivism for what it is, a group of charlatans pretending to describe language.

Well, it's your perogative, but it is a logical fallacy and makes you look like a single-minded crusader.

If I have "a flawed understanding of how prescriptivists work", please feel free to explain how they work. I've asked, time and again, for someone, anyone to offer proof for prescriptions offered and they're have been no takers.

Prescriptivists formulate rules, just like descriptivists do, but their philosophical position is that breaking the rules leads to a disintegration of the language, confusion among speakers, a loss of clarity and so on. They don't formulate rules for the sheer sake of it and then, when they fail to "prove" their position, pile on a load of exceptions and use "scare tactics" (as you put it in a previous post) to keep everybody in check.

"The importance that the present perfect adds ovverides [sic], on very limited occasions, the general reluctance of native speakers, and this is a great reluctance, to mix the present perfect and past time adjuncts."

That is not any kind of explanation as to why such overrides exist. It is merely a description of their effects.

I guess you actually are/were being a bit prescriptive in this, in that you make the assumption, unwarranted to my mind, that there is any need for a speaker to go back and "correct" the verb phrase.

That is the very mark of prescriptivism. "There must be something wrong with the speaker because that is a rule that simply must not be broken".

There is no need for a speaker to go back and "correct" the verb phrase. However, you yourself quote Swan as talking about the "great reluctance" of speakers "to mix the present perfect and past time adjuncts". Unconsciously, they are following a rule -- not one laid down by ignorant grammarians with nothing better to do, but one that forms instinctively. The "great reluctance" is how we experience the rule working.

My stance is not the one you suggest, that we should throw our arms up in horror at the way this rule is flouted. My stance is that if native speakers actually had time to analyse their own utterances, they would themselves agree that something doesn't sound quite right, even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on it. The descriptivist says, "Hmm, that's interesting; why would somebody utter a sentence that doesn't conform to the instinctive rule?" My answer is: "Because by the end of the sentence, they have already shifted their focus." There's nothing "wrong with the speaker" here; it is a fact that in natural speech and certain styles of writing, sentences are composed "on the fly". That's a very plain, clear and verifiable fact, and has nothing to do with the speaker's language skills: it does, however, have everything to do with the adaptability of human thought processes.

This isn't a mere assumption on my part. It has been quite extensively studied and observed.

Your position is that there is some other, even more complex, rule in effect which says that under certain circumstances, which you have not yet defined, something called an "override" comes into effect. By asserting that this seldom happens, you acknowledge that there are only a small number of circumstances under which this new rule can operate. I merely propose that there is one circumstance; namely, when the speaker recasts the sentence in mid-utterance. That makes sense of all of the available data, and if you want to dismiss this as an "assumption", you'll have to provide evidence that in fact, speakers construct sentences in their entirety before uttering them. If you can demonstrate that that is what actually happens, you'll probably be up for a Nobel prize, because it goes against everything that linguists have so far established.