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🍁 The occasional use of “who her …”

✍🏻 Lewis Gebhardt:

Linguists take a descriptive approach, being much more interested in observing and trying to understand what speakers actually do than in telling speakers what they should or shouldn’t do. A linguist would no more tell a speaker not to end a sentence with a preposition than a biologist would tell a bird not to fly. On verbal morphology, a prescriptivist may advise that the past tense of the verb dive is dived; a descriptivist, in contrast, observes that speakers say both dived and dove (rhymes with stove).

This isn’t to say that prescriptive and descriptive grammars are fundamentally opposed. For the most part, they align. For example, both prescriptive and descriptive grammars tell us that English adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify: big fish rather than *fish big. But when a prescriptivist points out a supposed mistake, a descriptivist leans on the side of speakers’ grammatical capacity. Let’s look at a specific example to get a feel for the difference in attitude and approach between someone proselytizing how people should use language and someone trying to understand how language works by describing how people talk. Both prescriptivists and descriptivists will note a certain oddity about ‘That’s the guy who his mother was my intro to lit professor’. If you included that sentence in a school paper, your English teacher would no doubt hand back the following editorial, i.e., prescriptive correction.

That’s the woman who her whose mother was my intro to lit professor,

A linguist, however, is more likely to react with, ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting’. English, of course, does have the pronoun whose that functions just as the English teacher recommends, but in ordinary speech, people do occasionally produce who her, who his and who their instead of whose, in a very systematic way not simply as a careless error that reflects the deterioration of the language and communication leading to the impending doom of civilization. From the point of view of linguists, there’s grammar underlying the who her construction. That ‘mistake’, interestingly, is probably related to a fact known to linguists who focus on crosslinguistic patterns in the field of typology. A relative pronoun like whose is much less common across languages than ordinary pronouns like who; languages seemingly prefer to separate the who meaning from a possessive piece like his. The fact that people sometimes say who her instead of whose is much more than supposed sloppiness or ignorance; it reveals something very deep about language – a crosslinguistic generalization about languages surfacing in a particular construction in English. (Gebhardt, 2023: 12 - 13)

📚 Gebhardt, Lewis. (2023). The Study of Words: An Introduction. UK: Routledge.

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1.4K viewsSep 26, 2024 at 03:12

🍁 The occasional use of “who her …”

✍🏻 Lewis Gebhardt:

Linguists take a descriptive approach, being much more interested in observing and trying to understand what speakers actually do than in telling speakers what they should or shouldn’t do. A linguist would no more tell a speaker not to end a sentence with a preposition than a biologist would tell a bird not to fly. On verbal morphology, a prescriptivist may advise that the past tense of the verb dive is dived; a descriptivist, in contrast, observes that speakers say both dived and dove (rhymes with stove).

This isn’t to say that prescriptive and descriptive grammars are fundamentally opposed. For the most part, they align. For example, both prescriptive and descriptive grammars tell us that English adjectives generally precede the nouns they modify: big fish rather than *fish big. But when a prescriptivist points out a supposed mistake, a descriptivist leans on the side of speakers’ grammatical capacity. Let’s look at a specific example to get a feel for the difference in attitude and approach between someone proselytizing how people should use language and someone trying to understand how language works by describing how people talk. Both prescriptivists and descriptivists will note a certain oddity about ‘That’s the guy who his mother was my intro to lit professor’. If you included that sentence in a school paper, your English teacher would no doubt hand back the following editorial, i.e., prescriptive correction.

That’s the woman who her whose mother was my intro to lit professor,

A linguist, however, is more likely to react with, ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting’. English, of course, does have the pronoun whose that functions just as the English teacher recommends, but in ordinary speech, people do occasionally produce who her, who his and who their instead of whose, in a very systematic way not simply as a careless error that reflects the deterioration of the language and communication leading to the impending doom of civilization. From the point of view of linguists, there’s grammar underlying the who her construction. That ‘mistake’, interestingly, is probably related to a fact known to linguists who focus on crosslinguistic patterns in the field of typology. A relative pronoun like whose is much less common across languages than ordinary pronouns like who; languages seemingly prefer to separate the who meaning from a possessive piece like his. The fact that people sometimes say who her instead of whose is much more than supposed sloppiness or ignorance; it reveals something very deep about language – a crosslinguistic generalization about languages surfacing in a particular construction in English. (Gebhardt, 2023: 12 - 13)

📚 Gebhardt, Lewis. (2023). The Study of Words: An Introduction. UK: Routledge.

#️⃣ #زبان_انگلیسی #دستور_زبان #گرامر

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