Grammar is a contentious point. Some argue that it’s horrifyingly appalling that ANYONE would ever utter the words “I drive pretty good”. (This, of course, is because good is an adjective, good is modifying drive, which is a verb, and our forefathers fought and died so that verbs would never be subjugated by adjectives.) Some would even argue that you are a fool, an ill-educated ass, and a corner-dwelling dunce if you managed to emerge from your schooling without learning that periods are properly placed INSIDE of quotation marks.
I am not a member of these groups, and I’m fighting back. Grammar should not be articles of faith handed down to us from those on high who never split infinitives but always split hairs. Grammar should be rules that allow us to communicate more efficiently, clearly, and understandably. I’m not advocating the abolition of grammar, but rather its justification. I’m not quite sure what that will entail in the end, but I’m starting out by pointing out grammar rules that just don’t make sense, don’t work, or don’t have any justification. All I want is for our rules of grammar to be well-motivated.
If you have any thoughts on this, especially if you have grammar rules that need motivated, drop me a line. [motivatedgrammar gmail com]
And about me: I’m Gabe Doyle, a fourth-year graduate student in Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. I’m a computational psycholinguist, which means that I use computers to model how people think about language. I work primarily on the issue of how people choose how to express the ideas they want to express. Some of my recent projects include looking at what influences people’s decisions about when to use needs to be done and when to use needs doing, the effect of relative pronoun choice on the ease of processing relative clauses, and a new method for experimentally determining the grammaticality of sentences. I also work in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments on joint modelling of text and images, and learning from only positive-labelled data. My dissertation creates a Bayesian model of how infants learn the words and grammar of their language. If you’d like to learn more about me or my research for some reason, head over to my website.
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October 19, 2008 at 8:44 am
HLB
Get on LinkedIn, dude. So folks can connect.
After all, life isn’t about who you know. It’s about who they know. And how they can help you achieve your purposes in this life.
HLB
Mt. Lebanon, PA
BTW: When I got out of the Navy, I headed back to San Diego. All of my friends, save one [another engineer], were at USD. Law students. They all owned a sailboat together. And when they weren’t sailing, scuba diving, having lobster roasts, and laughing about our Navy days sailing the seas, they went to class and wrote briefs. “Those were the days, my friend.”
February 21, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Boyd Brown
May I ask a question? What is the purpose of not splitting an infinitive? I read it is a rule from Latin and the author apparently saw nothing wrong with the splitting. The beginning of the original Star Trek series says “to go boldly forth … .” What’s the problem?
Thank you,
Boyd
February 26, 2009 at 9:49 am
Emily Schleier
Hello!
My name is Emily Schleier and I’m the Assistant Editor for a new media start-up publication titled The Printed Blog. You can download our latest issues at http://www.theprintedblog.com.
The Printed Blog is exactly that – a printed news publication with 100% of its content pulled from blogs and other user generated content. We are a new model of print publication based out of Chicago that has taken on the challenge of reviving the newspaper industry and turning in to a more community-based, interactive and user-generated medium. .
There are many advantages to our approach at forming a new type of newspaper. First and foremost, all of our content is taken from the internet and then put through an editorial process so that we’re sure our readers are only getting the best of the best when it comes to blogs, photos, music, events, etc.
With this being said, we think that your blog falls under the “best of the best” category and would feel extremely privileged if we were able to take articles from it to include in our publication. High profile blogs such as, Mashable, Daily Kos, The Bloggess, American Express and Bastard Life are all on The Printed Blog team!
All of the content that we use from the web is also completely accredited to the author and blog that it originated from, so this would be a great way to gain some exposure and bring traffic to your site.
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We are currently working on our sixth issue that is set to be distributed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago on Tuesday, March 3rd.
We’d love to add you to our list of blogs to pull content from in hopes to print one of your posts in an upcoming issue. Do we have your permission? We would also like to have the option of printing the images that accompany your blog posts- do you have the rights to these images? I look forward to hearing back from you and please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions. You can follow our progress on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter!
All the best,
Emily Schleier
Assistant Editor
The Printed Blog
319.795.2117
October 5, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Richard Tibbitts
Dear Mr. Doyle –
Although you present yourself as an authority on the subject (though modestly, which shows restraint), there are a couple of grammatical errors in your About section which I would like to point out.
To begin with, it would appear that you have fallen victim to the disturbing trend of unnecessary hyphenation, to wit:
“All I want is for our rules of grammar to be well-motivated.”
That’s certainly commendable, as I think most people who are interested in language would like that as well. However, unless the rules of grammar have changed since I went to school, there is absolutely no need for a hyphen to be inserted between an adverb and the adjective it modifies. One could, of course, speak of “well-motivated rules of grammar,” but in that case, the construction “well-motivated” is functioning as an adjective. When those words stand alone, as they do in the statement I quoted above, then different rules apply. In other words, in that example, the hyphen is redundant.
Another mistake in that section involves the following sentence:
“If you have any thoughts on this, especially if you have grammar rules that need motivated, drop me a line.”
I assume you meant “need motivation,” or “need [to be] motivated,” but either way, a little proofreading goes a long way, especially considering that the usage of language is the subject of this blog.
Sincerely,
Richard Tibbitts
October 6, 2009 at 8:43 am
Gabe
Richard: I appreciate your calling these points to my attention; however, they are not errors. Regarding “well-motivated”, I have a distinct dispreference for “well motivated” in this situation; my intuition backed up by the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes on the topic of adjective phrases well-X that “In attributive use the participial formations are properly hyphened, and the hyphen is also frequently employed even when the construction is predicative.” This is a predicative usage, and so I stand by the hyphen. (Redundancy is not a sufficient reason for me to omit something; “I know you went to the doctor” is often worse than “I know THAT you went to the doctor”.) Regarding “need motivated”, this is also an intentional usage, an homage to my Pittsburghian roots, where such usages are actually the standard. Should I perhaps lose it lest I lose face when someone reads the page and mistakes it for a mistake? An argument could be made for this course of action, but I feel no need to listen to it.