Originally Posted by
Tuco
"A single sense unit." Is that the way it's worded in your grammar? The dictionary?
Possibly. I just used what I thought was an appropriate expression.
That's fine. I understand that we can't converse purely technically. My reason fro bringing up the point was that it sounded like, "That's the way people throw language around. It's just kind of--that sense, ya know?"...and to this I would say, "Yes, I do know. That is usage." I think we don't argue about the usage aspect of language.
Tuco: I've also heard the emphasis argument. 5jj: Who has said anything about the 'emphasis argument'?
Nobody said anything about it here. I said that because the usage argument seems so frivolous, I thought I'd throw out another frivolous argument while we were at it. I feel as though people throw mud at a wall and see what sticks.
Tuco: It seems like people grasp at reasons to make errors "OK." 5jj: It's rather that we don't consider them to be errors.
So often I hear arguments pointing to usage that I get frustrated. Below...or above--somewhere you do point to British grammars, so we've moved on to that at least. Let's see where that goes.
As it happens, I say "I have a headache" myself, but I don't believe in teaching people that the acceptable "I have got/I've got" is wrong.
Acceptable. This moves us away from the term standard, which is confusing enough.
USAGE NOTE People who invoke the term
Standard English rarely make clear what they have in mind by it, and tend to slur over the inconvenient ambiguities that are inherent in the term. Sometimes it is used to denote the variety of English prescribed by traditional prescriptive norms, and in this sense it includes rules and usages that many educated speakers don't systematically conform to in their speech or writing, such as the rules for use of
who and
whom. In recent years, however, the term has more often been used to distinguish the speech and writing of middle-class educated speakers from the speech of other groups and classes, which are termed
nonstandard. This is the sense in which the word is used in the usage labels in this dictionary.
Standard English. Answers.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
Standard English: Definition from Answers.com, accessed February 05, 2006.
I don't want to open myself up on the matter of terminology. I know that I don't have the words to identify much in the realm of grammar, but when it comes to grammar, even Standard English is not necessarily used the same way by everyone. The differences are not the same as, say, red vs. pink, but rather black vs. white--that is, sometimes it means prescription, sometimes formal...or informal...usage. That's just not right.
My point is, "acceptable is extremely vague, and when people ask specific questions about correctness, it is helpful to be specific and state whether something is acceptable in usage, or according to rules. I see the problem though, as you don't seem to think that grammar consists of rules...excepting perhaps that there are no rules?
I don't think anyone has said that it's a redundancy. In some contexts the present perfect of GET has come to have the same meaning as the present simple of HAVE.
Paul Brians says it like this:
"(People often say) 'You’ve got mail' should be 'you have mail.'
The “have” contracted in phrases like this is merely an auxiliary verb indicating the present perfect tense, not an expression of possession. It is not a redundancy. Compare: “You’ve sent the mail. ”
In some contexts the present perfect of GET has come to have the same meaning as the present simple of HAVE.
To have current possession of. Used in the present perfect form with the meaning of the present: We've got plenty of cash.
Those last two were found in an earlier post as well. This sounds like incest, not productivity. It's like the entry word
infer. Definition four in one dictionary is
imply. That isn't productive. Let's just say that yin can mean yang, and vice versa, thereby adding flexibility and functionality. If you want to use a given tense, use it. If you want to create a new tense, create one. Add functionality...but don't use the wrong tense and confuse it with the right one. That doesn't add anything, and it is an error in usage.
I address this in my manuscript in the context of coining a phrase. When you coin a phrase, go ahead and dumb it down or others will do it for you. Go ahead. Don't make the distinction between productive changes and bastardizations. Help dumb down the language. We have plenty of people doing it here already. I just hope people are really good at limbo.
That's all I have time for at present.
Hopefully we have cut down on some of the points requiring attention here.