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I suspect all languages contain ungrammatical sentences, which are perfectly clear and accepted in common speech, and sometimes in formal writing.
Is this a well-formed English sentence? By what standard?
Are the following two sentences equally amenable to rigorous, grammatical descriptive theories? Would both pass in formal writing?
Not only do I suspect that ungrammatical sentences can be clear and acceptable, even in formal writing. I'm certain the opposite is also true, i.e. that grammatically correct sentences can be unclear and meaningless, even in common speech.
In fact, since languages with common ancestors like German and English have distinctly different patterns of usage in certain areas, people must have been so accepting of inconsistencies from time to time, that these inconsistencies came to transform the language, in whole or in part. It's easy to imagine this with pronounciation and morphology, but it must also be true of syntax.
Can "singular" they be substituted for every instance of a third person personal animate subject pronoun? Are any of the following grammatically wrong? Are any stylistically poor? Is it possible that grammar alone does not describe all features of language performance?
Can you rank the following options according to your own preference?
Is their in such examples a question of grammatical prohibition or of style?
Which is your natural preference?
What about the following? Can they be improved without "singular" they?
In what way is "singular" they helpful in these sentences?
Looking forward to some thoughts, just procrastinating writing up more about quantification. ;) Cheers. Alastair Haines 13:56, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
More questions.
Should the article be longer? There are many relevant authoratative sources with much to say. The grammar texts, are barely skimmed, likewise Newman contains further material. Strunk&White is mentioned, but not Chicago MOS, Reuters, Press Club, also various editorial boards have produceded written guidelines. Guide to Eng. Usage contains further material (at the entry for he/she) which could be used, and there is much useful material contained in external links/further reading, not to mention the references which are listed there such as Jesperson, Bodine and many others.
Should the article be shorter? The approach to this article relies on copious examples, as well as reporting from sources which themselves "stockpile" examples. Is it possible to do with fewer examples in the article?
Should the tags come off? Within English grammar, singular they is a controversial topic, that is unavoidable. I would say that the article currently satisfies both WP:V (verifiability) and WP:NPOV (neutral point of view), and so both questionable tags should come off the top of the article. Controversial points are all matched by references. The main problem I still see with the article is that a reader might get through the article, not consult any of the reference material, and then still question factuality. If the tags come off, however, a reader who questions any particular point could add the appropriate (citation needed) tag, and the article improved from that.
Comments? Newbyguesses - Talk 05:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Newbyguesses: I suspect all languages contain ungrammatical sentences, which are perfectly clear and accepted in common speech, and sometimes in formal writing.
I don't know what you mean by "ungrammatical" here.
Yes of course it is. By my standard. I'm a native speaker of English and it passes my acceptability test. But this is just me. Shall I pop it into a test for fifty native speakers? (This will cost me time and money and I will need to be refunded.) If on the other hand you're asking me for reasoning, I might venture that I (like he, she, we, and they) is only correct as a subject; that me and so forth correspond not only to French me but also to French moi.
Here's one for you:
Does that sound all right to you? (If so, your English and mine are very, very different.)
Strunk and White's Elements of Style is a stunningly stupid book. Don't take my word for this; look in the Language Log, passim. There you'll find comments on it by people who've actually taken the trouble to study language, and don't merely pontificate on how others should use it. (You might start here.) -- Hoary 12:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I’m not sure of the conventions in North American English, but it is perfectly acceptable to use ‘it’ for a baby or even child in British English. It is by no means an archaic usage. It is used either where the gender of a baby is unknown or when speaking of an unspecific baby or child.
For example, if I saw a baby being pushed down the street by some strangers and it was not immediately obvious of the baby’s gender it would be perfectly natural for me to say:
“The baby was being pushed down the street in its pram”. On the other hand if someone said “The baby was being pushed down the street in their pram” it would be commonly understood that “their” referred to the parents or other persons, not to the baby.
Also the well known amusingly ambiguous sentence: “If the baby will not drink its milk, boil it”. This is more natural than “If the baby does not drink their milk, boil it”, at least to my ears.
The pronoun “it” is more likely to be used for unspecific children rather than specific children of unknown gender – presumably because gender is usually obvious by then and society attaches more significance to gender as people grow up.
“The child that doesn’t eat its vegetables will not grow up to be healthy” would be perfectly acceptable.
But if speaking of a specific child it would be regarded as bizarre or rude to say “it threw the ball at me”. Similarly it would usually be unacceptably strange to refer to a specific adult of unknown gender as “it”. For example BT uses an automated voice to say “You were called today at [time]; the caller withheld their number”. However “the caller withheld its number” would sound wrong.
Booshank 22:59, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have long been of thopinion that it would be better to say e.g. "The caller's number was withheld." CanOfWorms ( talk) 07:37, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Fowler can't continue to view anything as anything. He died in 1933.
Even when alive, Fowler wasn't really a grammarian. He was a writer (and a good one) and a teacher. He wasn't in the same league as Jespersen and the like, and didn't claim to be.
Fowler's latest reviser/coauthor is one Jane E. Aaron. I've never heard of her, but her other books as listed by amazon.com suggest that she's a writer on writing, not a grammarian.
The various revisions of Fowler's book aren't grammars. They're guides for nervous writers on how to avoid writing that's poor either by most people's standards or by the standards, however batty, of a significant number of people. If you want a real reference grammar, there are two or perhaps three I can think of that are worth considering. The iffy one is the ageing "comprehensive" grammar by Quirk et al. The good ones are the Longman grammar by Biber et al., and the Cambridge grammar by Huddleston and Pullum and others. Have I omitted any? -- Hoary 05:07, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
We read:
Can we have examples of such style guides and editorial boards? This CGEU is merely quoted as speculating that such "purists" may exist. Does it name any? -- Hoary 14:05, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I started to go through this article, and was struck less by the myriad little points that I fixed (or hope that I fixed) than by its repetitiveness and longwindedness. This gradually got to me, and I paid less and less attention to what it was saying. About two thirds of the way through, it utterly defeated me.
I'm inclined to be very bold indeed, deleting over half of what's in the article.
Look, singular they is pretty simple, really. It's obvious that it has long been idiomatic for use as a singular bound pronoun but not as a singular referring pronoun (see Pullum for the distinction). Self-appointed experts have long wittered on about how it's not merely awkward (a matter of taste) but also logically and/or grammatically wrong. For decades, actual linguists have shown the prescriptivists to be wrong. Recently, use even where the sex is known has become idiomatic in the informal speech of many people. And there has been more pressure to use sex-indeterminate singular they because of pressure not to use he. And that's about it. It can of course be sprinkled with examples, and the examples should be sourced; and arguments can be summarized and cited, but the whole thing should nevertheless be a lot shorter.
I don't particularly relish the job of cutting this down to size, as singular they seems a trivial non-issue of language. Any takers? -- Hoary 14:07, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Hoary wrote,
"For decades, actual linguists have shown the prescriptivists to be wrong."
The correct phrasing would be, "For decades, Left-leaning descriptive linguists with their own ideological axes to grind have constructed convoluted, nonsensical, and jargon-riddled 'arguments' that have attempted to prove the prescriptivists wrong". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.4.185.39 ( talk) 19:22, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Examples occur throughout Engish literature.
These writers, from various periods of English letters, chose, for stylistic or other reasons, on these occasions, to employ the masculine form.
On these occasions, these writers, or the same writers, chose differently, stylistically.
What follows is mildly impressive, but seems to say little or nothing about singular they and also irritatingly forces lateral scrolling (in my browser window, at least). So I've removed it. -- Hoary 10:26, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
<ref>NA27</ref>
Ούτως | και | ο | πατήρ | μου | ο | ουράνιος | ποιησει | υμιν, | εαν | μη | αφητε | εκαστος | τω | αδελφω | αυτου | απο | των | καρδιων | υμων | τα | παραπτωματα | αυτων. |
Thus | too | the | father | my | the | heavenly | will do | to you, | if | not | you all forgive | each one | the | brother | his | from | the | hearts | your | the | trespasses | their. |
Just a couple of quick comments. There is a very prominent but incorrect POV that needs to be documented at this page, but not to the exclusion of the facts. That POV is roughly this:
It is incorrect because:
That the singular pronoun is preferable on logical grounds is abundantly clear by examination of usage in contexts where sexism cannot be an issue. It is also clear that both pronouns provide well-formed sentences, it is a matter of style, not of grammar.
The second sentence is not exactly equivalent to the first. Because English speakers normally associate they with plurality, the second sentence is more likely to suggest collectivity rather than distribution, i.e. the girls share the same sport. For precisely the reason that they has always been used in distributive constructions, the second sentence is ambiguous. In context, especially in speech, such ambiguity is usually no problem, there's enough information floating around in a discourse for the intention of the speaker to be clear.
Perhaps even more clear is:
When perceptions of sexism are not at stake, singular pronouns are prefered in distributive constructions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alastair Haines ( talk • contribs) 01:30, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
I think there would be many who would come to this page hoping to find references to quality sources that express the POV I mention above. I think we need to do that, and do it well. However, we are misleading people if we leave it at that. We can also do a lot better.
However
What would make this article POV is: assuming that prescriptivism is always wrong, ignoring that gender-neutral language reform is in fact prescriptive, failing to recognize that the argument for singular pronouns in distributive constructions is based on logic not sentimentalism.
The bottom line is this. An editor of this article should ask herself, would she personally ever use generic he in a context that could include women? If her answer is "no", that's all well and good, but it doesn't give her the right to forbid that usage to others. That's not what Wiki is about. In fact, it is easy to be NPOV at this article, there are good reasons to avoid generic he in many contexts, and singular they is often the best solution. However, generic he has logical clarity, directness, suits itself to translation from highly inflected languages and exists in so much literature already that we need to report it. Frankly, we're not allowed to recommend either usage are we? We should simply document where, when, and by whom they are used.
Alastair Haines 23:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
Alastair Haines 13:27, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
We now read: Speaking hyperbolically, Steven Pinker goes so far as to say such and such.
Where does he say it?
Who says that what he says is hyperbole? -- Hoary 12:27, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
The article has struck me as confused in various ways. One was the way it kept presenting more or less sensible stylistic prescriptions/advice/commentary under a variety of headings. Most of these headings were at least moderately satisfactory, but the reason for separating wasn't clear. Moreover, some of the stylistic stuff was mixed up with purely descriptive material.
What immediately struck me as a sensible idea was to separate (a) the descriptive material from (b) the stuff about style. After all, the latter is commentary; and articles normally say what a movie, building or dialect is before summarizing reactions to it.
I therefore started on this job. However, while doing it, I realized two things:
First, it seems likely that, for better or worse, stylistic commentary has had at least some effect on actual use. Thus description (e.g. that by Huddleston and Pullum) can't completely ignore prescription and metalinguistic notions.
Secondly, if the article is encyclopedic at all, it's the metalinguistic notions (however batty) that make it so. (Consider the complementizer that: "I told the police that I killed her". It's far more important in English than singular they, but nobody kicks up a fuss about it and so it's not encyclopedic.)
So I'm now inclined to switch the order around:
Of course the body would be subdivided where necessary.
But I'm not going to rush to make further changes to the order of the article, as I realize that they make diffs unusable: "being bold" is fine; but preferably after agreement, so that you don't have to be bold all over again and further screw up your diffs.
Comments? -- Hoary 02:00, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
Typos aside, wow.
Hoary 12:34, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for the reply and I'm glad we seem to be on the same wavelength. Right now I'm in a huge rush, so I'll have to limit myself to one matter. (I hope to return to the others a few hours from now.) I don't have any theory about when singular "they" became preferred. I imagine that, yes, it became preferred (by people talking about "preferences") since the 1970s or so. But for somebody (with whatever background knowledge and/or axe to grind) to say that X is "preferred" (regarded as better) over Y is not the same as the result of, say, a corpus study that shows X is actually commoner than Y. And "preferred" can be used for the latter. Back in 1896, such a confusion would have been commoner. So, two questions (among many): Was "he" preferred over "they" by prescriptivists (of all flavors) in the mid-20th century? (I'd guess that it was, but I don't know.) And was it actually commoner in speech? I have no idea, and I don't suppose the question can even be investigated. (Conceivably, there's some sort of corpus somewhere of mid-20th-century "vernacular" writing -- the kind that hasn't gone through a trained copyeditor, and some study has been done of this.) -- Hoary 02:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
<snip from edit conflict>
From what I'm reading at the moment, there are lots of uncoordinated theories regarding quantification, distribution and indefiniteness in general. Logicians and linguists overlap in their interest in the area and best terminology is a matter of active discussion. People seem to agree that they don't understand all the issues well enough to be certain which frameworks provide the most comprehensive and flexible set of integrated concepts to model indefiniteness in natural language.
Sorry if all that sounds like gibberish, the words are chosen carefully. The main point is that 1990s linguistics and 2000s linguistics does not actually understand all the factors involved in the semantics of natural language usage in constructions where people use "singular" they.
Don't get me wrong on this. Ordinary people understand what they are saying to one another, and academics understand it too. What the academics don't understand (and ordinary people don't even get curious about) is how to explain the patterns of usage in a simple and consistant manner. It's a bit like the ancient models of how stars moved around in the sky, which were true enough, but much more complicated than modern models that are based on the earth moving around the sun.
Having said that, there is a lot that is understood regarding such constructions. Firstly, they are way more complicated than a distinction between singular and plural. That means any prescriptivists (and Strunk and White are the only ones I've actually encountered so far) are certainly wrong. But it also means the very name "singular" they is just as wrong.
The reason I know all this is because I've googled "quantification" and a range of associated phrases, checked out academic level papers rather than popular explanations, and the papers are often addressing questions like, "which theory provides a better account of quantifiers, descriptors, predicates, etc?"
At an undergraduate level, people are normally exposed to theories that have come to more or less complete and coherent form. By graduation people have been exposed to the more problematic parts of certain theories, or introduced to new approaches that show promise of providing superior explanatory power. Without meaning to be uppity about it, it normally takes years for research to make its way into undergrad textbooks, and from there into popular print, and only after that into the popular press, if at all.
The question is, what do we do at this Wiki page. It'd be way cool if the internet made popularization of cutting edge academic papers at Wiki possible. But I keep getting nervous about copyright. I read some great PhD dissertations that are online at young academics personal sites. I guess a lot wouldn't mind their work being cited at Wiki. In some cases though, it feels almost like "industrial espionage". I suppose I should just email them and have a chat.
Anyway, I think I'll write up Lewis, summarize the sort of thing I'm saying here, point at a couple of papers that demonstrate the point, and call it a day.
Pinker takes things as far as most people really want or need to know. "Singular" they is not a mere matter of syntax, but involves quite challenging semantic/logical analysis -- bound variable will do, but it is a long way from the end of the story.
Drat, and I really thought I was going find an answer somewhere. :( Alastair Haines 16:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I finally read the Pullum radio interview. It was nice to see he said explicitly it was all about logic and quantification. LoL, he said it was too involved for the radio interview, and not covered adequately in the Cambridge Grammar. Mind you, I was surprised to find I disagreed with him about something, though. I think "singular" they can be used more than he does ... in particular with refering pronouns, and specifically in the case he mentioned -- a person of known name but unknown gender. Undoubtedly people use it that way ...
But I'd be interested to hear a serious analysis from him. He doesn't actually say much in the interview. From what he does say, the example above, whether found in usage or not, is ungrammatical. Ungrammatical forms are found in usage all the time. The fact that something is used doesn't make it grammatical. Hence, the fact that someone declares something ungrammatical that can be demonstrated to be widespread usage doesn't make him a prescriptivist. Or Pullum would be guilty himself! Sometimes it is specifically because words "bend" grammar that they have their power, other times, they just seem to happen ...
Pullum said very little about generic he, and what he did say looked like paper tigers to me. I've never read anyone who seriously says he is gender neutral, what I have read is that it is generic. People prior to the 60s, 70s or 80s didn't use language like gender neutral. So anyone calling generic he gender-neutral, sex-neutral or whatever since, has indeed chosen the wrong descriptor. Generic he: gender-inclusive, yes; gender-neuteral, no. But that's for the he page really. Alastair Haines 12:22, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 |
I suspect all languages contain ungrammatical sentences, which are perfectly clear and accepted in common speech, and sometimes in formal writing.
Is this a well-formed English sentence? By what standard?
Are the following two sentences equally amenable to rigorous, grammatical descriptive theories? Would both pass in formal writing?
Not only do I suspect that ungrammatical sentences can be clear and acceptable, even in formal writing. I'm certain the opposite is also true, i.e. that grammatically correct sentences can be unclear and meaningless, even in common speech.
In fact, since languages with common ancestors like German and English have distinctly different patterns of usage in certain areas, people must have been so accepting of inconsistencies from time to time, that these inconsistencies came to transform the language, in whole or in part. It's easy to imagine this with pronounciation and morphology, but it must also be true of syntax.
Can "singular" they be substituted for every instance of a third person personal animate subject pronoun? Are any of the following grammatically wrong? Are any stylistically poor? Is it possible that grammar alone does not describe all features of language performance?
Can you rank the following options according to your own preference?
Is their in such examples a question of grammatical prohibition or of style?
Which is your natural preference?
What about the following? Can they be improved without "singular" they?
In what way is "singular" they helpful in these sentences?
Looking forward to some thoughts, just procrastinating writing up more about quantification. ;) Cheers. Alastair Haines 13:56, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
More questions.
Should the article be longer? There are many relevant authoratative sources with much to say. The grammar texts, are barely skimmed, likewise Newman contains further material. Strunk&White is mentioned, but not Chicago MOS, Reuters, Press Club, also various editorial boards have produceded written guidelines. Guide to Eng. Usage contains further material (at the entry for he/she) which could be used, and there is much useful material contained in external links/further reading, not to mention the references which are listed there such as Jesperson, Bodine and many others.
Should the article be shorter? The approach to this article relies on copious examples, as well as reporting from sources which themselves "stockpile" examples. Is it possible to do with fewer examples in the article?
Should the tags come off? Within English grammar, singular they is a controversial topic, that is unavoidable. I would say that the article currently satisfies both WP:V (verifiability) and WP:NPOV (neutral point of view), and so both questionable tags should come off the top of the article. Controversial points are all matched by references. The main problem I still see with the article is that a reader might get through the article, not consult any of the reference material, and then still question factuality. If the tags come off, however, a reader who questions any particular point could add the appropriate (citation needed) tag, and the article improved from that.
Comments? Newbyguesses - Talk 05:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Newbyguesses: I suspect all languages contain ungrammatical sentences, which are perfectly clear and accepted in common speech, and sometimes in formal writing.
I don't know what you mean by "ungrammatical" here.
Yes of course it is. By my standard. I'm a native speaker of English and it passes my acceptability test. But this is just me. Shall I pop it into a test for fifty native speakers? (This will cost me time and money and I will need to be refunded.) If on the other hand you're asking me for reasoning, I might venture that I (like he, she, we, and they) is only correct as a subject; that me and so forth correspond not only to French me but also to French moi.
Here's one for you:
Does that sound all right to you? (If so, your English and mine are very, very different.)
Strunk and White's Elements of Style is a stunningly stupid book. Don't take my word for this; look in the Language Log, passim. There you'll find comments on it by people who've actually taken the trouble to study language, and don't merely pontificate on how others should use it. (You might start here.) -- Hoary 12:30, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I’m not sure of the conventions in North American English, but it is perfectly acceptable to use ‘it’ for a baby or even child in British English. It is by no means an archaic usage. It is used either where the gender of a baby is unknown or when speaking of an unspecific baby or child.
For example, if I saw a baby being pushed down the street by some strangers and it was not immediately obvious of the baby’s gender it would be perfectly natural for me to say:
“The baby was being pushed down the street in its pram”. On the other hand if someone said “The baby was being pushed down the street in their pram” it would be commonly understood that “their” referred to the parents or other persons, not to the baby.
Also the well known amusingly ambiguous sentence: “If the baby will not drink its milk, boil it”. This is more natural than “If the baby does not drink their milk, boil it”, at least to my ears.
The pronoun “it” is more likely to be used for unspecific children rather than specific children of unknown gender – presumably because gender is usually obvious by then and society attaches more significance to gender as people grow up.
“The child that doesn’t eat its vegetables will not grow up to be healthy” would be perfectly acceptable.
But if speaking of a specific child it would be regarded as bizarre or rude to say “it threw the ball at me”. Similarly it would usually be unacceptably strange to refer to a specific adult of unknown gender as “it”. For example BT uses an automated voice to say “You were called today at [time]; the caller withheld their number”. However “the caller withheld its number” would sound wrong.
Booshank 22:59, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
I have long been of thopinion that it would be better to say e.g. "The caller's number was withheld." CanOfWorms ( talk) 07:37, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Fowler can't continue to view anything as anything. He died in 1933.
Even when alive, Fowler wasn't really a grammarian. He was a writer (and a good one) and a teacher. He wasn't in the same league as Jespersen and the like, and didn't claim to be.
Fowler's latest reviser/coauthor is one Jane E. Aaron. I've never heard of her, but her other books as listed by amazon.com suggest that she's a writer on writing, not a grammarian.
The various revisions of Fowler's book aren't grammars. They're guides for nervous writers on how to avoid writing that's poor either by most people's standards or by the standards, however batty, of a significant number of people. If you want a real reference grammar, there are two or perhaps three I can think of that are worth considering. The iffy one is the ageing "comprehensive" grammar by Quirk et al. The good ones are the Longman grammar by Biber et al., and the Cambridge grammar by Huddleston and Pullum and others. Have I omitted any? -- Hoary 05:07, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
We read:
Can we have examples of such style guides and editorial boards? This CGEU is merely quoted as speculating that such "purists" may exist. Does it name any? -- Hoary 14:05, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I started to go through this article, and was struck less by the myriad little points that I fixed (or hope that I fixed) than by its repetitiveness and longwindedness. This gradually got to me, and I paid less and less attention to what it was saying. About two thirds of the way through, it utterly defeated me.
I'm inclined to be very bold indeed, deleting over half of what's in the article.
Look, singular they is pretty simple, really. It's obvious that it has long been idiomatic for use as a singular bound pronoun but not as a singular referring pronoun (see Pullum for the distinction). Self-appointed experts have long wittered on about how it's not merely awkward (a matter of taste) but also logically and/or grammatically wrong. For decades, actual linguists have shown the prescriptivists to be wrong. Recently, use even where the sex is known has become idiomatic in the informal speech of many people. And there has been more pressure to use sex-indeterminate singular they because of pressure not to use he. And that's about it. It can of course be sprinkled with examples, and the examples should be sourced; and arguments can be summarized and cited, but the whole thing should nevertheless be a lot shorter.
I don't particularly relish the job of cutting this down to size, as singular they seems a trivial non-issue of language. Any takers? -- Hoary 14:07, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Hoary wrote,
"For decades, actual linguists have shown the prescriptivists to be wrong."
The correct phrasing would be, "For decades, Left-leaning descriptive linguists with their own ideological axes to grind have constructed convoluted, nonsensical, and jargon-riddled 'arguments' that have attempted to prove the prescriptivists wrong". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.4.185.39 ( talk) 19:22, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Examples occur throughout Engish literature.
These writers, from various periods of English letters, chose, for stylistic or other reasons, on these occasions, to employ the masculine form.
On these occasions, these writers, or the same writers, chose differently, stylistically.
What follows is mildly impressive, but seems to say little or nothing about singular they and also irritatingly forces lateral scrolling (in my browser window, at least). So I've removed it. -- Hoary 10:26, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
<ref>NA27</ref>
Ούτως | και | ο | πατήρ | μου | ο | ουράνιος | ποιησει | υμιν, | εαν | μη | αφητε | εκαστος | τω | αδελφω | αυτου | απο | των | καρδιων | υμων | τα | παραπτωματα | αυτων. |
Thus | too | the | father | my | the | heavenly | will do | to you, | if | not | you all forgive | each one | the | brother | his | from | the | hearts | your | the | trespasses | their. |
Just a couple of quick comments. There is a very prominent but incorrect POV that needs to be documented at this page, but not to the exclusion of the facts. That POV is roughly this:
It is incorrect because:
That the singular pronoun is preferable on logical grounds is abundantly clear by examination of usage in contexts where sexism cannot be an issue. It is also clear that both pronouns provide well-formed sentences, it is a matter of style, not of grammar.
The second sentence is not exactly equivalent to the first. Because English speakers normally associate they with plurality, the second sentence is more likely to suggest collectivity rather than distribution, i.e. the girls share the same sport. For precisely the reason that they has always been used in distributive constructions, the second sentence is ambiguous. In context, especially in speech, such ambiguity is usually no problem, there's enough information floating around in a discourse for the intention of the speaker to be clear.
Perhaps even more clear is:
When perceptions of sexism are not at stake, singular pronouns are prefered in distributive constructions. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alastair Haines ( talk • contribs) 01:30, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
I think there would be many who would come to this page hoping to find references to quality sources that express the POV I mention above. I think we need to do that, and do it well. However, we are misleading people if we leave it at that. We can also do a lot better.
However
What would make this article POV is: assuming that prescriptivism is always wrong, ignoring that gender-neutral language reform is in fact prescriptive, failing to recognize that the argument for singular pronouns in distributive constructions is based on logic not sentimentalism.
The bottom line is this. An editor of this article should ask herself, would she personally ever use generic he in a context that could include women? If her answer is "no", that's all well and good, but it doesn't give her the right to forbid that usage to others. That's not what Wiki is about. In fact, it is easy to be NPOV at this article, there are good reasons to avoid generic he in many contexts, and singular they is often the best solution. However, generic he has logical clarity, directness, suits itself to translation from highly inflected languages and exists in so much literature already that we need to report it. Frankly, we're not allowed to recommend either usage are we? We should simply document where, when, and by whom they are used.
Alastair Haines 23:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
Alastair Haines 13:27, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
We now read: Speaking hyperbolically, Steven Pinker goes so far as to say such and such.
Where does he say it?
Who says that what he says is hyperbole? -- Hoary 12:27, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
The article has struck me as confused in various ways. One was the way it kept presenting more or less sensible stylistic prescriptions/advice/commentary under a variety of headings. Most of these headings were at least moderately satisfactory, but the reason for separating wasn't clear. Moreover, some of the stylistic stuff was mixed up with purely descriptive material.
What immediately struck me as a sensible idea was to separate (a) the descriptive material from (b) the stuff about style. After all, the latter is commentary; and articles normally say what a movie, building or dialect is before summarizing reactions to it.
I therefore started on this job. However, while doing it, I realized two things:
First, it seems likely that, for better or worse, stylistic commentary has had at least some effect on actual use. Thus description (e.g. that by Huddleston and Pullum) can't completely ignore prescription and metalinguistic notions.
Secondly, if the article is encyclopedic at all, it's the metalinguistic notions (however batty) that make it so. (Consider the complementizer that: "I told the police that I killed her". It's far more important in English than singular they, but nobody kicks up a fuss about it and so it's not encyclopedic.)
So I'm now inclined to switch the order around:
Of course the body would be subdivided where necessary.
But I'm not going to rush to make further changes to the order of the article, as I realize that they make diffs unusable: "being bold" is fine; but preferably after agreement, so that you don't have to be bold all over again and further screw up your diffs.
Comments? -- Hoary 02:00, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
Typos aside, wow.
Hoary 12:34, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for the reply and I'm glad we seem to be on the same wavelength. Right now I'm in a huge rush, so I'll have to limit myself to one matter. (I hope to return to the others a few hours from now.) I don't have any theory about when singular "they" became preferred. I imagine that, yes, it became preferred (by people talking about "preferences") since the 1970s or so. But for somebody (with whatever background knowledge and/or axe to grind) to say that X is "preferred" (regarded as better) over Y is not the same as the result of, say, a corpus study that shows X is actually commoner than Y. And "preferred" can be used for the latter. Back in 1896, such a confusion would have been commoner. So, two questions (among many): Was "he" preferred over "they" by prescriptivists (of all flavors) in the mid-20th century? (I'd guess that it was, but I don't know.) And was it actually commoner in speech? I have no idea, and I don't suppose the question can even be investigated. (Conceivably, there's some sort of corpus somewhere of mid-20th-century "vernacular" writing -- the kind that hasn't gone through a trained copyeditor, and some study has been done of this.) -- Hoary 02:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
<snip from edit conflict>
From what I'm reading at the moment, there are lots of uncoordinated theories regarding quantification, distribution and indefiniteness in general. Logicians and linguists overlap in their interest in the area and best terminology is a matter of active discussion. People seem to agree that they don't understand all the issues well enough to be certain which frameworks provide the most comprehensive and flexible set of integrated concepts to model indefiniteness in natural language.
Sorry if all that sounds like gibberish, the words are chosen carefully. The main point is that 1990s linguistics and 2000s linguistics does not actually understand all the factors involved in the semantics of natural language usage in constructions where people use "singular" they.
Don't get me wrong on this. Ordinary people understand what they are saying to one another, and academics understand it too. What the academics don't understand (and ordinary people don't even get curious about) is how to explain the patterns of usage in a simple and consistant manner. It's a bit like the ancient models of how stars moved around in the sky, which were true enough, but much more complicated than modern models that are based on the earth moving around the sun.
Having said that, there is a lot that is understood regarding such constructions. Firstly, they are way more complicated than a distinction between singular and plural. That means any prescriptivists (and Strunk and White are the only ones I've actually encountered so far) are certainly wrong. But it also means the very name "singular" they is just as wrong.
The reason I know all this is because I've googled "quantification" and a range of associated phrases, checked out academic level papers rather than popular explanations, and the papers are often addressing questions like, "which theory provides a better account of quantifiers, descriptors, predicates, etc?"
At an undergraduate level, people are normally exposed to theories that have come to more or less complete and coherent form. By graduation people have been exposed to the more problematic parts of certain theories, or introduced to new approaches that show promise of providing superior explanatory power. Without meaning to be uppity about it, it normally takes years for research to make its way into undergrad textbooks, and from there into popular print, and only after that into the popular press, if at all.
The question is, what do we do at this Wiki page. It'd be way cool if the internet made popularization of cutting edge academic papers at Wiki possible. But I keep getting nervous about copyright. I read some great PhD dissertations that are online at young academics personal sites. I guess a lot wouldn't mind their work being cited at Wiki. In some cases though, it feels almost like "industrial espionage". I suppose I should just email them and have a chat.
Anyway, I think I'll write up Lewis, summarize the sort of thing I'm saying here, point at a couple of papers that demonstrate the point, and call it a day.
Pinker takes things as far as most people really want or need to know. "Singular" they is not a mere matter of syntax, but involves quite challenging semantic/logical analysis -- bound variable will do, but it is a long way from the end of the story.
Drat, and I really thought I was going find an answer somewhere. :( Alastair Haines 16:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I finally read the Pullum radio interview. It was nice to see he said explicitly it was all about logic and quantification. LoL, he said it was too involved for the radio interview, and not covered adequately in the Cambridge Grammar. Mind you, I was surprised to find I disagreed with him about something, though. I think "singular" they can be used more than he does ... in particular with refering pronouns, and specifically in the case he mentioned -- a person of known name but unknown gender. Undoubtedly people use it that way ...
But I'd be interested to hear a serious analysis from him. He doesn't actually say much in the interview. From what he does say, the example above, whether found in usage or not, is ungrammatical. Ungrammatical forms are found in usage all the time. The fact that something is used doesn't make it grammatical. Hence, the fact that someone declares something ungrammatical that can be demonstrated to be widespread usage doesn't make him a prescriptivist. Or Pullum would be guilty himself! Sometimes it is specifically because words "bend" grammar that they have their power, other times, they just seem to happen ...
Pullum said very little about generic he, and what he did say looked like paper tigers to me. I've never read anyone who seriously says he is gender neutral, what I have read is that it is generic. People prior to the 60s, 70s or 80s didn't use language like gender neutral. So anyone calling generic he gender-neutral, sex-neutral or whatever since, has indeed chosen the wrong descriptor. Generic he: gender-inclusive, yes; gender-neuteral, no. But that's for the he page really. Alastair Haines 12:22, 29 September 2007 (UTC)