Proper use of "you and ....."

[Naamplao]

Originally Posted by riverkid

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?


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.

You know....I have never heard of such a thing as a "override reflexive pronoun". So I googled it and found a grand total of ZERO...not ONE reference to this term!!!

I googled "override reflexives" and found a grand total of SIX references all of which are associated with CGEL

I added a hyphen between "over" and "ride" and got Zero results for both.

This bible thumping zealotry of CGEL as the only way to speak/teach English is getting to be annoying. As shown by those searches, this method of English teaching has hardly mainstream and has not displaced traditional methods of teaching English.

Perhaps it will gain acceptance but so far it has not.

[riverkid]

[quote=Naamplao;236575]You know....I have never heard of such a thing as a "override reflexive pronoun". So I googled it and found a grand total of ZERO...not ONE reference to this term!!!

I googled "override reflexives" and found a grand total of SIX references all of which are associated with [color=Black]CGEL

I added a hyphen between "over" and "ride" and got Zero results for both.

And what are we to determine from this, Naamplao?

Originally Posted by Naamplao

This bible thumping zealotry of CGEL as the only way to speak/teach English is getting to be annoying. As shown by those searches, this method of English teaching has hardly mainstream and has not displaced traditional methods of teaching English.

I'm afraid that I must let you know that the bible-thumping comes from those who can offer no more than their opinion or more often than not, the opinions garnered from some style manual.

The only other thing offered by prescriptivists is a stern warning that you will offend some purists somewhere, sometime. Hardly what one would consider a scientific approach.

Originally Posted by Naamplao

Perhaps it will gain acceptance but so far it has not.

Dollars to donuts, you have never even looked between the covers, Naamplao. Have you?

No one, that's NO ONE has addressed any of the questions I raised. How do you know that the prescriptive admonitions accurately reflect how language is used?

January 26, 2005
"Everything is correct" versus "nothing is relevant"

Geoffrey Pullum

What's so interesting is that it is quite clear Zink cannot see any possibility of a position other than two extremes: on the left, that all honest efforts at uttering sentences are ipso facto correct; and on the right, that rules of grammar have an authority that derives from something independent of what any users of the language actually do.

But there had better be a third position, because these two extreme ones are both utterly insane.

#

[riverkid]

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.

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.

[2006]

riverkid wrote...
1..."No one, that's NO ONE has addressed any of the questions I raised."
2..."How do you know that the prescriptive admonitions accurately reflect how language is used?"

riverkid:
1...Maybe that's because most of your rants, and the links you quote to support them, don't merit a response.
2...I don't think that teaching a language is just declaring that some people somewhere say something so it must be as legitimate as anything else. And the fact that you are considerably outnumbered on this thread should cause you to think that maybe you don't accurately reflect how English is taught/used. In spite of that, you do more preaching than anyone else.

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by 2006

riverkid wrote...
1..."No one, that's NO ONE has addressed any of the questions I raised."
2..."How do you know that the prescriptive admonitions accurately reflect how language is used?"

riverkid:
1...Maybe that's because most of your rants, and the links you quote to support them, don't merit a response.

The links are to the most highly respected, most up to date grammar references on the market. The alternative to that is a few folks offering someone else's opinions about how language works.

We're still at that stage where none of you have offered anything at all to support your position.

And where did I say that, 2006?

It is you who has prescribed that certain structures are "bad language" but if you'll go back and read the thread you'll find that that's all you and the others have done.

Is this then your newest offering of proof for your position, that I'm outnumbered?

#

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by Anglika

The original enquirer only wanted to know which would read better in a letter to a business contact!

And you still haven't filled us in on just how you determined this, Anglika? Why should the original enquirer take you at your word when there were numerous equally valid opinions from others in the office?

If that was all that was required then why did you sit idle as inaccurate information about English was presented?

LGSWE

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.

[Naamplao]

Originally Posted by 2006
And the fact that you are considerably outnumbered on this thread should cause you to think that maybe you don't accurately reflect how English is taught/used. In spite of that, you do more preaching than anyone else.

Originally Posted by riverkid

Is this then your newest offering of proof for your position, that I'm outnumbered?

Quoted by Naamplao:

You know....I have never heard of such a thing as a "override reflexive pronoun". So I googled it and found a grand total of ZERO...not ONE reference to this term!!!

I googled "override reflexives" and found a grand total of SIX references all of which are associated with CGEL

I added a hyphen between "over" and "ride" and got Zero results for both.

I think the fact that this point of view is not widely demonstrated on the Internet supports the position that you are promoting a view that is not widely held...not just on this forum...everywhere.

Your views here are controversial at best and the fact that this system of teaching is not accepted in the main means that ESL learners will potentially be punished by getting low marks in important tests and exams.

Until and if the CGEL views on the English language become adopted as standard practice in the English community then this discussion belongs where it apparently now resides....in academia. You are not helping ESL learners ... You are hurting them.

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by Naamplao

I think the fact that this point of view is not widely demonstrated on the Internet supports the position that you are promoting a view that is not widely held...not just on this forum...everywhere.

Your views here are controversial at best and the fact that this system of teaching is not accepted in the main means that ESL learners will potentially be punished by getting low marks in important tests and exams.

Until and if the CGEL views on the English language become adopted as standard practice in the English community then this discussion belongs where it apparently now resides....in academia. You are not helping ESL learners ... You are hurting them.

That's where you're mistaken, Naamplao. This type of construction, [and others like it] is widely used by all levels of English speaker. That was duly noted. Perhaps you missed that part. I've included it, again, at the end of this posting.

Obviously, you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like "Don't split infinitives" or "Never begin a sentence with [because]." It would just sit there. In fact, we already have machines that don't split infinitives; they're called screwdrivers, bathtubs, cappuccino- makers, and so on.

Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences to begin with. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say [Apples the eat boy] or [Who did you meet John and?] or the vast, vast majority of the trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words.

So when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articl...wrepublic.html

That's all that these prescriptions are, Naamplao, made up notions that have nothing to do with real language. Note that in the OP, the writer already knew that "Bob and yourself" was an option.

The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the [New York Times Magazine], calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! [Kibbitzers] and [nudniks] is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articl...wrepublic.html

It's really amazing that you can suggest what you're suggesting when you know that all around you people don't follow prescriptions. It's not possible because they are "alien to the natural workings of language". Don't be confused by the fact that a coterie of prescriptivists can give the false illusion that these "rules" are being followed.

The CGEL and the LGSWE and other descriptive sources, describe language as it's actually used. Did you miss that part too. So these things are mainstream and ESLs should not be denied language that the vast majority of ENLs use daily.

Did you read the part where Professor Pinker said; "For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them,"?

Why hasn't it occurred to you that there has been no, [that's zero] defence for the prescriptive viewpoint? Oh, there was one; the old scare routine about students being docked a point or two on tests for using, get this, natural language. That's a problem easily solved. Tell students how language really works. That's the only fair and honest thing to do. Why keep repeating the same old canards. Language science has shown them for what they truly are.

Read the rest of the Pinker article, if you dare. Why not go to the library and crack open the CGEL, the LGSWE? Then you may begin to understand just how mainstream these things are. After that, it's simply a matter of teachers describing how and where they fit into language.

Probably no "grammatical error" has received as much scorn as "misuse" of pronoun case inside conjunctions (phrases with two parts joined by [and] or [or]). What teenager has not been corrected for saying [Me and Jennifer are going to the mall]? The standard story is that the object pronoun [me] does not belong in subject position -- no one would say [Me is going to the mall] -- so it should be [Jennifer and I]. People tend to misremember the advice as "When in doubt, say 'so-and-so and I', not 'so-and-so and me'," so they unthinkingly overapply it, resulting in hyper-corrected solecisms like [give Al Gore and I a chance] and the even more despised [between you and I].



But if the person on the street is so good at avoiding [Me is going] and [Give I a break], and even former Rhodes Scholars and Ivy League professors can't seem to avoid [Me and Jennifer are going] and [Give Al and I a chance], might it not be the mavens that misunderstand English grammar, not the speakers? The mavens' case about case rests on one assumption: if an entire conjunction phrase has a grammatical feature like subject case, every word inside that phrase has to have that grammatical feature, too. But that is just false.



[Jennifer] is singular; you say [Jennifer is], not [Jennifer are]. The pronoun [She] is singular; you say [She is], not [She are]. But the conjunction [She and Jennifer] is not singular, it's plural; you say [She and Jennifer are], not [She and Jennifer is.] So a conjunction can have a different grammatical number from the pronouns inside it. Why, then, must it have the same grammatical [case] as the pronouns inside it? The answer is that it need not. A conjunction is just not grammatically equivalent to any of its parts. If John and Marsha met, it does not mean that John met and that Marsha met. If voters give Clinton and Gore a chance, they are not giving Gore his own chance, added on to the chance they are giving Clinton; they are giving the entire ticket a chance. So just because [Al Gore and I] is an object that requires object case, it does not mean that [i] is an object that requires object case. By the logic of grammar, the pronoun is free to have any case it wants.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articl...wrepublic.html

[Naamplao]

Originally Posted by riverkid

That's where you're mistaken, Naamplao. This type of construction, [and others like it] is widely used by all levels of English speaker. That was duly noted. Perhaps you missed that part. I've included it, again, at the end of this posting.



That's all that these prescriptions are, Naamplao, made up notions that have nothing to do with real language. Note that in the OP, the writer already knew that "Bob and yourself" was an option.

RiverKid....you show all the charm of an evangelical Christian telling me that I am going to Hell because I am a Protestant and not Evangelical.

The FACT that there are few if any references on the internet other than those of CGEL for Override Reflexive Pronouns says that this term and other have not been adopted by other teachers of English. Period. Full Stop.

The writer did not know if "Bob and yourself" was an option...he was asking the question. I agree with Anglika and others that this is not correct. You are the only one in this group that supports this construction.

I don't believe that it helps ESL learners as it relates to ability to pass tests and exams that are important to their advancement in the English world. They cannot go wrong by learning English they way that is pre-CGEL.

Who knows CGEL may be accepted as the mainstream English teaching method and become acceptable in current international testing and formal writing. Right now it seems to be a topic in academia.

This discussion is ended for me...there is no more to add. In fact I am sure you will like the fact that you are on my ignore list.

[riverkid]

Originally Posted by Naamplao

RiverKid....you show all the charm of an evangelical Christian telling me that I am going to Hell because I am a Protestant and not Evangelical.

When there's nothing left to argue, out comes the ... . Naamplao, note that in all this and still, there's has been nothing to prove the prescriptivist point. This would be funny if it didn't so serious affect ESLs.

The following goes for me too.

LANGUAGE LOG
October 28, 2006

Evil

First, let me distance myself from the view -- religious or otherwise -- that it's "evil to prescribe".

Sometimes, as in the "than me" affair, prescription is based on mistaken analysis, false history or bad logic. This is foolish, but it's not evil.

In other cases, prescription is based on resistance to innovation. This is usually futile, but it's not evil.

It's not clear whether discussion about performance errors of various sorts should be considered prescriptive, but it's certainly not evil. And linguists don't recommend performance errors, though we sometimes study them.

Some prescriptive advice deals with style, tone, or communicative effectiveness. Advice of this sort may be right or wrong, useful or useless, but it's not evil. Here at Language Log,we often have advice of this kind to offer, though we're careful to distinguish linguistic norms from stylistic preferences.

In our discussions of eggcorns, snowclones, overnegations, linguifications and so forth, it's clear that we're talking about violations of lexical, syntactic, semantic or stylistic norms. We don't recommend such violations, though we often enjoy them.

Publications often choose a "house style" that prescribes what to do with possessive plurals and the like -- such style books disagree, and linguists (like other people) sometimes disagree with particular choices, but there's no evil here.

Originally Posted by Naamplao

The FACT that there are few if any references on the internet other than those of CGEL for Override Reflexive Pronouns says that this term and other have not been adopted by other teachers of English. Period. Full Stop.

It doesn't matter what the name is, Naamplao. It's a description of something that already exists in language. It's in frequent use. That prescriptive grammar has missed virtually everything there is to know about language is clear. That what it has described is mostly wrong is also clear.

That is clearly illustrated by the fact that none of you can provide any reasoning, sound or otherwise for your prescription. Go thru the thread and count them; there are none!

Originally Posted by Naamplao

Originally Posted by Naamplao

The writer did not know if "Bob and yourself" was an option...he was asking the question. I agree with Anglika and others that this is not correct. You are the only one in this group that supports this construction.

"I'm writing a business letter, and I am wondering about the way I used a common phrase: "It was very nice meeting you and Bob." Is there a more proper way to write this? Others in my office have suggested, "It was nice meeting Bob and yourself." Maybe I should consider, "It was nice meeting yourself and Bob." I'm not sure what to do....."

Originally Posted by Naamplao

I don't believe that it helps ESL learners as it relates to ability to pass tests and exams that are important to their advancement in the English world. They cannot go wrong by learning English they way that is pre-CGEL.

I challenge you to prove that this isn't simpley another old canard.

Prescriptivists hold to this mistaken assumption that ESLs are stupid, that they can't discern between what's expected for formal language and what's fine for everyday speech. Nothing is further from the truth. When it comes to ENLs, which Unregistered is, why offer prescriptions, which don't describe actual language, when you can describe how language really works.

This is such a simple concept. How is it that it escapes prescriptivists?

Originally Posted by Naamplao

Who knows CGEL may be accepted as the mainstream English teaching method and become acceptable in current international testing and formal writing. Right now it seems to be a topic in academia.

You keep harping on this when you know that it's already mainstream English. It's a descriptive account of the English language.

Originally Posted by Naamplao

This discussion is ended for me...there is no more to add. In fact I am sure you will like the fact that you are on my ignore list.

Funny, that's how prescriptivists always handle these things. Not a one of the prescriptivists that Professor Pinker dismantled in his book, The Language Instinct defended their position. Doesn't that speak volumes as to their scholarship?

I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that I don't have an ignore list. It somehow seems rather juvenile to me.

HOW GRAMMARS OF ENGLISH
HAVE MISSED THE BOAT
THERE'S BEEN MORE FLUMMOXING THAN MEETS THE EYE

Charles-James N. Bailey

Consider the possibility that English grammar has been misanalysed for centuries because of grammarians’ accepting fundamentally flawed assumptions about grammar and, not least, because of a flawed view of the history of English; and that these failings have resulted in a huge disconnect between English grammars and the genius of the English that really exists among educated native-speakers. The development of the information age and of English as a world language means that such lapses have even greater negative import than formerly. But what is available on the shelves has fallen into sufficient discredit for grammar to have forfeited its place in the curriculum, unrespected and little heeded by the brighter students.