CV, Thanks. I've made my living from adaptive verbal and written language communication for 15 years, so I think I've got a fairly good handle on the place of grammar. It is indeed used for consistency in part, but not in the way that most people think about it. Grammar is an internal mechanism of language evident from studying the actual use of it. Yet often we describe and talk about externally created rules, as if someone needed to decide that we weren't very good at this communication thing, despite a few thousand years of forward progress.
The main "rule" brought up in this discussion actually is based not on true grammar that is born of how people communicate. Like others, it is from social engineering attempts to enforce class distinctions. So, while much of the time I agree that knowing rules and when to break them is a good thing, first one must know that the rules are valid. In this case, it is not. If you are interested in seeing what language scholars think about all this, I invite you to visit the fine folks at UPenn: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ Incidentally, I was not trying to prove a point with my sentence fragments, though I was certainly using a style that gives emphasis. Sorry it was hard to read for you. As you say, sometimes it is a choice to go against the rule. In this case, I opted for more emphatic versus straightforward structure. All the best, Phillip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=43910 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
