On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 16:34:59 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Tuesday, 16 June 2015 at 08:54:01 UTC, Chris wrote:
So the implication that use of the nonstandard form would lead
to confusion is pure pedantry."
Yes, indeed.
Much of the difficulty with discussions of language in the
modern world comes from not making a distinction between its
denotative and connotative aspects. The former relates to what
is actually being said, and the latter to all the other
thoughts and impressions that are evoked by saying it in that
way.
Modern people emphasize excessively the denotative aspects,
whereas connotations do matter since - as the neuroscience
tells us - there are subtle priming effects and there are
consequences from shifting the brain into different modes.
That's perhaps also in part why people do care about syntax in
computer languages, even though at one level anything precise
might be felt to do the job.
Back to your point, many non-Western cultures have different
kinds of speech according to the social context. That's
because wanting to do so is a human group thing, not a DWEM
thing. Of course in the past years there was a relaxation of
standards of formality due to concerns over it creating a
noxious and unwarranted exclusivity. That may have been a good
thing in some ways. But I think every human group will
ultimately need to retain distinctions between different
registers of speaking and writing...
My point was not so much formal vs non-formal speech but the fact
that a lot of these decisions are linguistically (not socially)
arbitrary, often counter intuitive, and made by people who want
to draw a line between their own (privileged) group and others
they do not deem worthy of the same privileges. Again in the
words of Pinker:
"Perhaps most importantly, since prepscriptive rules are so
psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the
right schooling can abide by them, they serve as shibboleths,
differentiating the elite from the rabble."
I couldn't put it better myself. There's no linguistic reason why
double negatives shouldn't be in the standard varieties of
English. (Greek logic != linguistic logic)
