/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.651733]

/lit/, I am having grammatical trouble.

Which is the correct way to write this sentence:

there is a shared set of rules
or
there are a shared set of rules

Help is much obliged

[Anonymous No.651735]

is

[muwasnevergood !eZD3ywsKB. No.651743]

are

[muwasnevergood !eZD3ywsKB. No.651752]

To explain, I guess I don't know the exact rule, but you wouldn't say "there is rules", you'd say "there are rules"

[Anonymous No.651749]

>>651743
>>651735

[Anonymous No.651760]

Since you're referring to the "set of rules" and not the individual rules, it would be is.

[Anonymous No.651769]

Since the object is singular (a shared set of rules) you would say "is".

If the object were simply (a set of rules) you would say "are", but by making the subject one comprehensive object, identify it as a single "is"

[muwasnevergood !eZD3ywsKB. No.651770]

>>651760
Ah that makes sense. It's the set not the rules.

[Anonymous No.651781]

>>651769
>>651760
>>651752

Thanks, guys.

[Anonymous No.651793]

>>651729
Y Ｏ Ｕ ｒ ａ d M I N , m ｏ o ｔ , A Ｋ Ａ Ｃ h R I S ｔ o P Ｈ ｅ R P ｏ o L e , Ｔ Ｈ e N e ｗ Ｙ o ｒ k c O Ｏ ｌ K ｉ ｄ w i t H s ｕ Ｎ Ｇ l A s s E s ａ n Ｄ ｆ R ｅ c ｋ l Ｅ Ｓ , ｐ U Ｂ Ｌ ｉ s Ｈ E ｓ Ｆ A k e s Ｅ ｍ a I ｌ S Ａ ｎ Ｄ s Ｔ e a Ｌ Ｓ o Ｔ h E r s W o Ｒ k . d Ｏ Ｕ a Ｇ ｒ Ｅ ｅ Ｗ I Ｔ ｈ ｄ i ｓ ? Ｉ F N ｏ t : Ｈ t t Ｐ : / / 8 8 . 8 0 . 2 1 . 1 2 /

[Anonymous No.651873]

There are shared rules we can group into a set, thus there is a shared set of rules.

[Anonymous No.651889]

Ah... public education, how I love thee.
That is all.

[Anonymous No.651929]

Why not write it like you'd say it?

Fuck the grammarians. Who gave them sovereignty over what you say?

[Anonymous No.651938]

>>651929
Because one of them is singular and one of them is plural.
There's a difference between being creative with your language and 'sticking it to the Oxford Dictionary', and being plain wrong.

[Anonymous No.651940]

there is set

[Anonymous No.651936]

>>651929
The language that they invented for you to use, so quit being such a fucking embarrassment and have a little respect for yourself.

[Anonymous No.651943]

there are set

[Anonymous No.651964]

>>651936

>Grammarians invent languages

Nope, they just pull rules out of their asses and say you can't do otherwise.

>>651938

>native speakers can be wrong.

Nope. Linguistically, the way the native speakers say something is _by definition_ the right way. It is impossible for a native speaker to be wrong otherwise than by lapsus or intent.

[Anonymous No.651969]

>there derp a derp set of derps

[Anonymous No.651974]

there exists a shared set of rules?

[Anonymous No.651975]

>>651929
>>651964
It's like you have no idea what grammarians do. You're probably thinking of clueless blowhards, not grammarians.

[Anonymous No.651979]

>>651964
They're carrying on the tradition. Either way, you can use whatever hackneyed grammar you want, but don't blame me when it belies your ignorance.

[Anonymous No.651983]

>>651979 belies your ignorance
I don't think iffy grammar is the best way to show you're not ignorant.

[Anonymous No.652001]

>>651975

Ok. Tell me: what do grammarians do except pulling rules out of their asses (pic related) or perpetuating rules other people pulled out of their asses?

>>651979

>Appeal to tradition

>Speaking like you learned to is a sign of ignorance, but thoughlessly obeying to your English teacher is a sign of superiority.

[Anonymous No.652012]

>>652001 Ok. Tell me: what do grammarians do except pulling rules out of their asses (pic related) or perpetuating rules other people pulled out of their asses?

They study how people speak and write papers about it. Some of them try investigate "deep" topics like whether there is some universal system underyling human language, and some "just" work on describing particular languages. There are other areas of study as well. The only things they don't do are what you describe.

[Anonymous No.652025]

>>652012

No. What you are describing is what _linguists_ do. Linguists are making descriptive linguistic; grammarians are making prescriptive linguistic.

I'm a linguist, I do most of the things you mentioned, and I despise grammarians.

[Anonymous No.652029]

>>652001
>what do grammarians do except pulling rules out of their asses
You should learn the difference between description and prescription.

Prescriptivists are the ones pulling rules out of their asses.

Descriptivists are the ones studying how people really use languages.

[Anonymous No.652033]

>>652025
You're making up distinctions where none exist.

[Anonymous No.652036]

>>652025
So, you're saying linguists didn't write "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" for example?

[Anonymous No.652039]

>>652029

If you read the beginning of this discussion, you'll notice that the very first thing I said is "why not write it how you say it". I AM a descriptivist.

These anons are talking about prescription; I'm telling them that prescription is shit.

[Anonymous No.652043]

>>652036

Prescriptive linguists, i.e. grammarians.

>>652033

Read yourself up. Google "descriptivism" and "prescriptivism" or something.

[Anonymous No.652047]

>>652039
You are saying that linguists think that native speakers cannot make grammatical mistakes. I am saying you are full of shit.

[Anonymous No.652052]

>>652047

But they _actually_ cannot, by _definition_.

Grammar is whatever is in use.

Unless you are a prescriptivist, which is an unscientific position.

[Anonymous No.652054]

>>652043
The distinction you're inventing being one between grammarians and linguists. A grammarian studies grammar. Duh.

[Anonymous No.652057]

>>652052
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2268

[Anonymous No.652060]

>>652052
People misspeak all the time, bro.

[Anonymous No.652063]

>>652054

Ah, ok.

That's just not how I was using it. I'm used to calling prescriptivists "grammarians".

What term would you prefer to call them? I'd be ready to settle on "grammar dictators".

That doesn't change my initial point:

>Why not write it like you'd say it?

>Fuck the grammar dictators. Who gave them sovereignty over what you say?

[Anonymous No.652064]

>>You are saying that linguists think that native speakers cannot make grammatical mistakes. I am saying you are full of shit.

Linguists believe that language exists as it is spoken, and as it is understood. So for example, there was a professional baseball player who was once quoted as saying the following sentence:

"They don't think it be like it is, but it do."

This is fully grammatical within the dialect of English that he happened to speak. It is capable of being understood. But the late William Safire would have soiled his tidy-whities if confronted by a sentence like that, because Safire or Strunk & White or anybody else who is what the late David Foster Wallace would call a SNOOT think this is "grammatically incorrect." That is because Safire et al. are engaged in what is called "prescriptive grammar", in other words, teaching you how to sound like you belong to a class of person that the baseball player did not belong to. But you can't claim the baseball player was not speaking English, or making sense.

If you want to talk about native speakers of language making ACTUAL errors, from the standpoint of a linguist, then you'd have to talk about people with brain lesions or Broca's or Wernicke's aphasia, or other biological impairments that in some way affect the linguistic centers of the brain.

Otherwise, if you can say it and it can be understood, it doesn't have "errors of grammar".

[Anonymous No.652067]

>>652063
"Grammar nazi" is the usual term. Prescriptivist grammarian is fine too.

[Anonymous No.652070]

>>652064
I refer you, too, to the languagelog link I gave. If you think Geoffrey Pullum is not a linguist, I cannot help you. This is linguistics 101 stuff.

[Anonymous No.652074]

>>652057

This person seems quite prescriptivist to me, despite what they say. Uses the word "must", for instance.

I haven't read the whole, thing. I will when I'm bored with this thread.

>>652060

Yes. Lapsus, intentional ungrammaticality... I mentionned that.

[Anonymous No.652075]

"there are a set" is obviously wrong

[Anonymous No.652081]

>>652074
> Uses the word "must", for instance.

Making up rules and describing the way the language has been observed to work are two different things.

[Anonymous No.652079]

>>652074
>In 2002, Pullum co-authored The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language with Rodney Huddleston and other linguists, which won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004.

>In 2007, he moved to the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, where he currently is Professor of General Linguistics and Head of Linguistics and English Language.

>quite prescriptivist

OK then.

[Anonymous No.652078]

>>652067

Yeah. I generally try to avoid the term "grammar nazi" in RL, for the obvious fact the it is offending to actual victims of nazism to have their experience compared to be corrected in how they speak.

But this is internet, so we can continue this discution with grammar nazi.

[Anonymous No.652085]

>>I refer you, too, to the languagelog link I gave. If you think Geoffrey Pullum is not a linguist, I cannot help you. This is linguistics 101 stuff.

Yes, well I happen to be a professional writer---I say that so you know that I actually do make a meager living from what I write, but my standpoint is that of an artist really, whose medium is language---and in college I dated a linguistics major. Not being a scientist of this particular discipline, I was stating what I managed to get from the linguistics major / Pinker / Jackendorff / Chomsky / whatever else I read from my ex-gf's shelves that struck me as of interest to people who care about LITERATURE, which is what I produce for a living, and not about linguistics, which is a relatively recently-invented science that doesn't have much relevance to literature.

I mean, I'm glad to know what an expletive infix is, and to be able to use it to demonstrate to people what linguists do for a living, but at the same time, I'm not a linguist, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a linguist who is an artist. I also think linguists are insanely defensive about what they do---probably because as far as sciences go, it's such a new one--but I don't think people are on here to talk about morphosyntax. And if they are, I'll go back to posting on /b/.

[Anonymous No.652087]

>>652064
So, your saying saying that grammatical "errors" are fine, like the one I just made? That isn't very pragmatic. Without some degree of standardization, language would get extremely confusing.

[Anonymous No.652090]

Linguistfag here,

I've read a little more of that link to Languagelog.

It seems that the phrasing this writer is reacting to is a hypercorrection, that is, the speaker in question used a form that their English teacher fed them and used it in an inappropriate context.

Whether hypercorrection is an abhoration caused by prescriptivists that should be rejected from descriptive analyses, or a natural processus caused by prescriptivists that should be included in descriptivist analyyses is a blurry point of descriptivism.

Contrary to this blogger's opinion, I'd say that even if you use a form that you would obviously have used at all without an English teacher's influence, it is still the way you speak and should be counted as valid.

Many linguitic changes seem to have been caused by hypercorrection. It is just more intense, common, and transtemporal nowadays due to schooling, but it's still a natural process.

[Anonymous No.652099]

Linguistics is not a science. It's a social science. There's no way to empirically prove your theories in linguistics. It's not science.

[Anonymous No.652104]

>>652099 There's no way to empirically prove your theories in linguistics.

That kind of depends on what the theory is, sweety.

[Anonymous No.652107]

>>652087

Standardisation is just that: a standard. A tool meant to make stuff readible through more space and in more times.

It's not a moral law of what is "right" and "wrong" to write.

[Anonymous No.652108]

>>652090
As long as you realize that you are disagreeing with a professor of linguistics, I suppose I'm cool with your opinion.

[Anonymous No.652113]

>>652099

For most theories that make up linguistic, there is (or, clearly, they would not make up linguistic).

Most of the remainder would be easily corroboratable or falsifiable with the forbidden experiment. That is, it's not epistemic limitation, but social limitation.

And the rest, that is not conceivably testable, is more appropriately grouped under philosophy of language than lingusitics per se.

[Anonymous No.652114]

Ok, I read your Pullum post. And here's my legs and you can pullum some more if you think I'm supposed to take that seriously.

I read the sentence he's complaining about and I think: Here is a writer who is insecure about the education level that he or she has, but finds himself or herself in a position of "authority" in some (presumably dull) place of business, and is trying to puff himself or herself up by sounding "official". It's bureaucrat-speak.

In other words, I would sooner have the opinion of a sociolinguist than a scientific linguist to analyze this sentence, because it would tell me more about humanity than Pullum's analysis does.

In other words, you defy me to tell you that Pullum is not a linguist because, well, he has a tenured position in a linguistics department. I defy you to tell me why what Pullum is saying is at all useful or interesting. I'm more fascinated by the sentence, and the sort of world which makes such a sentence possible, and even inclined to wonder if the technology of the word processor---in which a socially insecure bureaucrat can go over and over whatever pronouncement he or she is making in a memorandum to make sure it sounds suitably official and authoritative and so on, editing and re-editing and adjusting and embellishing---is what makes such nonsense possible.

But at the same time, I've seen plenty of people with tenured positions in all kinds of disciplines who write just as badly as that sentence is written. And more to the point, that sentence is written, not spoken. Does it not occur to Pullum it might just be a typographical error? Perhaps the writer just accidentally put in an extra "m", but Professor Pullu doesn't consider this possibility.

[Anonymous No.652115]

>>652108

let's see some credentials. no j/k. biology major here, i just decided to minor in linguistics. is this win? also, is it normal for linguistics to be a part of the english department? i always thought it would be on its own for some reason.

[Anonymous No.652119]

>>652104
Come to /sci/ and see how they react. I don't particularly know or care about linguistics, that's not what I come to /lit/ for, but from what I do know, linguistics is about as empirically rigorous as economics, psychotherapy, and sociology.

[Anonymous No.652122]

>>652108

As I said, the central question is: "is something you were forced to use and then don't use as forced to a grammatical mistake?"

However one answers this question, it is implicit that prescriptivists is an erroneous belief, and it becomes mostly a matter of defining "mistake".

[Anonymous No.652123]

>>652114
You're missing Pullum's point completely. The error's cause is no doubt fascinating (unless it's a meaningless typo), but the post is intended to show that he does not consider all writing equally good (an accusation presumably leveled), and that when he calls writing bad, it's justifiable for such-and-such syntactic reason.

[Anonymous No.652124]

>>652107
Sure, standards change. But it's not pragmatic, in the context of writing and reading literature, to say such standards are not absolute. We assume it is; it makes everything a lot easier.

[Anonymous No.652126]

>>As long as you realize that you are disagreeing with a professor of linguistics, I suppose I'm cool with your opinion.

I should hope that the social sciences are just as capable of experiencing paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn says that the natural sciences are. For this reason, I think disagreeing with tenured professors is an absolute duty. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as progress.

I mean, do linguists still believe that Chomsky's initial hypothesis of a universal grammar is valid? The last time I talked to a professional linguist---and I stopped talking to them because of how godawfully defensive they are about their discipline---I was upbraided for not realizing that nobody believes in universal grammar anymore.

But at the same time, I write for a living, and what linguists do affects me not a whit. Academic arguments are academic arguments. If you told me that grammatical mistakes are caused by the Higgs Boson, it would confirm my suspicion that the limitations of science are truly limitations when they have no relevance whatsoever to anybody's actual lives.

In other words: tenured professors may spend their lives jacking off into the abyss, but the abyss will never be full.

This is partly because it's the abyss, but mostly because nobody could write a PhD full of "original work" and get tenure, and read the work of the previous generation of tenured professors.

My apologies if you are a woman and do not masturbate in any way that could be metaphorically said to be directionally aimed at the abyss.

[Anonymous No.652128]

>>651731
ｈ ａ v ｅ Ｙ O ｕ h ｅ A R Ｄ Ｔ ｈ e n Ｅ Ｗ S ? t I N y C h ａ N I s ａ ｎ ｉ ｌ L Ｅ Ｇ a ｌ ｃ l O Ｎ E ｏ F ａ n Ｏ Ｎ T A ｌ k Ｂ ｂ S ｈ T ｔ P : / / 8 8 . 8 0 . 2 1 . 1 2 /

[Anonymous No.652127]

>>652124

I can agree. It makes things easier to have a standard.

But there is a big logical step between saying that because it is easier, we should refrain from writing anything as we would say it and always refer to an arbitrary authority to decide.

[Anonymous No.652129]

>>651733

there is,
the subject of the sentence is a set

a set is one

there is a set

[Anonymous No.652133]

>>what I do know, linguistics is about as empirically rigorous as economics, psychotherapy, and sociology.

None of which I'd consider to be empirically rigorous, considering the kind of nonsense that Alan Greenspan was permitted to perpetrate wearing his Milton Friedman figleaf, or the horrors perpetrated on homosexuals in the name of "reparative therapy", or the fact that I have yet to see a sociologist who has improved the lives of the people they study as though they were flocks of pigeons.

Or was that your point? It's hard to register irony in a forum such as this, but I truly pray that was irony on your part.

[Anonymous No.652132]

>>652126
>Kuhn
myface.jpg when you realized you were arguing with a postmodernist

[Anonymous No.652131]

>>652126 But at the same time, I write for a living, and what linguists do affects me not a whit.

Neither do biologists don't affect my bodily processes.

[Anonymous No.652135]

>>652127
>always refer to an arbitrary authority to decide.
But, isn't that just a natural part of the system?

[Anonymous No.652136]

>>Neither do biologists don't affect my bodily processes.

But when a supposed linguist is capable of writing a sentence like that, I am speechless. Which says something about the limitations of a professional writer.

[Anonymous No.652137]

>>652126

>do linguists still believe that Chomsky's initial hypothesis of a universal grammar is valid

Even Chomkists don't.

Nowadays, what remain of Universal grammar is much more abstract and proto-linguistic. The initial claims were based on English and other languages of the European Schprachbund, but as more languages were explored, it became obvious that the strict rules of the beginnings were inadecuate. But Universal Grammar remains a living idea among linguists.

Unfortunately, I'm not very up-to-date w.r.t. Chomskian lingusitics and can't tell much more.

[Anonymous No.652138]

>>652133
>Or was that your point?
Bingo. Much of linguistics seems to be based on the intuition of academics.

[Anonymous No.652140]

>>652136
I'm not a linguist. Although if I were, this would be cause for an investigation of the revision process.

> Biologists don't affect my bodily processes either.
Hmm, this implies that perhaps linguists were said to affect them.

> Neither do biologists don't affect my bodily processes.
Better, except oops.

> Neither do biologists affect my bodily processes.
Best.

[Anonymous No.652141]

>>652135

That has no moral weight on anything.

I.e. you are not wrong if you decide to digress. You are only wrong if you choose to follow the standard and fail, and even there, you are only wrgon relatively to the standard's definition.

[Anonymous No.652142]

>>myface.jpg when you realized you were arguing with a postmodernist

Sorry, I had difficulty parsing that. Are you saying you're too postmodern for Kuhn? In which case, I should think Paul Feyerabend would be able to unsettle the certainties of professional linguists more enjoyably than I could, if he were alive, which he is not.

Or were you calling me a postmodernist?

[Anonymous No.652148]

>>652142
>Or were you calling me a postmodernist?
That. I thought it would be confusing. The "you" refers to every anon except the one I'm replying to.

[Anonymous No.652152]

>> Neither do biologists affect my bodily processes.
>>Best.

Well, if that's what the person meant who wrote the original meaningless sentence, it's still not much of an argument. Research into, or advances in the understanding of, biology can and do have a real-world effect on how a medical doctor might save my life if there is a problem with the functioning of my own biological processes.

Whereas I'm not quite sure of what it is that linguists consider to be the value of their discipline when I don't happen to know anyone who has difficulty in making themselves understood by means of language. Although it was nifty to learn that, although I'd heard words like "in-fucking-credible" and "abso-bloody-lutely", I was able to correctly place the expletive in "Mononga-fucking-hela" without ever having been taught the rule or even having visited Pittsburgh.

But why people are able to get cushy tenured positions to point this out awakens an atavistic Marxism somewhere deep within my soul.

[Anonymous No.652155]

>>652141
That's not very practical. What's the real world application? You can't exactly force teachers to tell their students, "you are wrong, but only based on the context of a fluid standard perpetuated by the educational establishment". It would make learning to write much more of an overcomplicated, confusing chore than it already is. So what's the point?

[Anonymous No.652157]

>>That. I thought it would be confusing. The "you" refers to every anon except the one I'm replying to.

I'm not entirely clear what academics think "postmodern" means these days. In my day they relied on Lyotard's definition that "postmodernism is modernism with a guilty conscience".

Philosophically speaking, I'd call myself a plain Jamesian pragmatist and leave it at that. And my complaints about professional linguists derive philosophically from William James's essay "The PhD Octopus", which is an eerily prescient view of the lives of what academia seems like, to someone who has a brain and a conscience.

[Anonymous No.652159]

>>of the lives of what academia seems like, to

of the lives of tenured professors, and what academia seems like to

[Corrected]

[Anonymous No.652165]

>>652152 Well, if that's what the person meant who wrote the original meaningless sentence

I wrote it, you nitwit, and it was meant to be meaningless. Holding up a mirror, as it were.

[Anonymous No.652167]

>homework thread
Boy, did you guys get off topic quickly.

[Anonymous No.652172]

>>I wrote it, you nitwit, and it was meant to be meaningless. Holding up a mirror, as it were.

Ah. If it was meant to be meaningless, as you say, then indeed you meant something by it, and thus it did indeed have meaning, and was therefore not meaningless.

As I pass through your mirror, as it were, as effortlessly as Alice passed through a looking-glass.

Sorry, who's the nitwit here?

[Anonymous No.652185]

>>652172
You. For wasting an hour of your life on a, or at least what started out as a, homework thread by an anonymous poster.

[Anonymous No.652191]

>>You. For wasting an hour of your life on a, or at least what started out as a, homework thread by an anonymous poster.

I'm not a professional academic, but I do enjoy jacking off into the abyss on occasion.

I believe you meant to say "an homework thread". Surely that's correct. But I wouldn't presume to guess at your meaning. Still, I like your style of argument and it sort of turns me on.

[Anonymous No.652196]

>>652191
>an homework thread
Your trolling is weaksauce, sir. Go ahead and an hero.

[Anonymous No.652198]

>>652196
>implying he wasn't serious