From: scobbie@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Jim Scobbie)
Subject: Re: Natural language, prescriptivism, etc.
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 23:36:24 GMT

"formal language and natural language are basically the same thing"

There are a bunch of real natural languages out there - a finite corpus,
but most linguists are interested in what a natural language can be,
in the abstract. We use formal models to discuss natural language.
Our theories must cover all natural languages, and all possible ones.

Can a language make a question by reversing the order of morphemes?
	I am a linguist <-> linguist a am I
No. I say - "this is impossible". I don't think that's a prescriptive
statement however, not in the usual sense. It's a theoretical
desriptive statement. If I find a language that does this the rule
must be changed. Otherwise, what use is it - it expresses my opinion,
not a fact of language, and my opinions are not worthy of record.

What about formal languages? Is natural language a formal language?
Or does it merely have a formal core? The latter seems true.
Anagrams are not part of our formal linguistic ability, let's say,
but a cognitive add-on, part of general intelligence, say. So
there is a formal core to langauge, I'll say that quite happily.
There's a lot of mush around the edges. 

We can ask whether grammar is context free from this perspective,
whether phonology is monotonic, and so on. Formal questions.
Language is compositional, or not. It is recursive, or not.

This is entirely different, it seems to me, from saying that 'hopefully'
is a bad word. If its use entails alteration to our rules which have
to date captured the synatax and semantics of English - then the rules
have to be changed since otherwise they do not model English any more.
It is different from banning split infinitives, or saying that two
negatives make a positive. These are not observations of language
re-stated as part of a theory of language open to refutation. They are
dictats out of step with the object under scrutiny.

As I grew up I had no subject control verbs. By that I mean I could say
"Bill persuaded Fred to go", where Fred does the going, but I could
not say "Bill promised Fred to go" where Bill does the going. It was
simply not part of my grammar. I had no subject control verbs, so I
had to say "Bill promised Fred (that) he'd go", where an overt
pronoun is used. Now. Suppose I am a socially powerful community,
who teaches its own English in schools. Suppose I say "there are
no subject control verbs in English". And I'm right. Suppose a
bunch of kids come in and write in their essays: "the president
promised congress to win the war" [[that sounds so weird to me!]]

Q: Do I tell them: this is bad English, nice people like me don't use it.
   You won't get a job or any respect [from people like me] if you use it.
A: yes  - why hide the truth about the world from our kids.

Q: Do I say: this is not English - it is illogical and breaks the rules of
   the language.
A: no, because the rules are defined *by* the language.

What are the rules based on? I have a notion of 'possible human
language' and this notion must permit all actual dialects of all
actual languages. Otherwise it is wrong. I have a notion of 'current
English' or 'standard English'. A new usage may not conform to that
dialect, but it is not illogical, errorful or any other thing based on
its linguistic content. If it is part of human language and can be
modelled formally as a rule of grammar then that is surely exactly
what it is. It may be socially, culturally, educationally, regionally
substandard.  That is up to the users of the community to decide too.
Justification is often sought in pseudo-linguistics, however.
Fallacious arguments abound. 

Clever people hate stupid people using new words and call the new
words slang. (Same clever people often quote foreign languages and
produce latinate neologisms to prove their own inventiveness.)
Clever people think they own the rights and patents to 'the language'
or more accurately, to 'the standard'. But as they get old, feeble
and useless, the standard moves on and leaves them behind. Our lack
of control over fashion, slang, grammar, morals, and taste reminds us
of our mortality. First we subvert, then we join in, then we define,
then we are ignored by the new definers. That makes a lot of us unhappy.
"Young people nowadays..."

My mother in law remarked last night on 'hot cup of tea'. "That's
wrong, isn't it?" she said. "The tea is hot, not the cup".  So: she
doesn't say it herself (thinks she), and she has a grudge against
it, most probably because her teacher had a grudge against it too.  I
remarked that "red pot of paint" certainly can't mean red paint, but
"big plate of prawns" doesn't mean the plate is big, nor the prawns,
but that a large number of prawns is on the plate,  and that "hot cup
of tea" can mean either, *for me*. "But what is right and what is
wrong?" she wanted to know. Her rule - that an adjective modified the
nearest noun - seemed precise but wrong, even to her.  She'd rather
the language changed to fit her rules. "Tough" I said. She doesn't
like pop music either - "it's just noise with no tune".

Good style and bad style exist - I'd teach those. My style isn't
very good, I'm afraid, but I've seen worse. I'd now wish I'd had
more of that kind of teaching, instead of being told to write

I was walking along the road when something funny happened
insteda of
When I was walking down the road something funny happened.

Or to avoid
However, one cannot change the past to suit the future
in favour of
One cannot, however, change the psat to suit the future.

I doubt I have ever started a sentence with 'however'. It's just,
well, illogical like. 



-- 
James M. Scobbie: Dept of Linguistics, Stanford University, CA 94305-2150, USA
                  scobbie@csli.stanford.edu