Brad Beyenhof([EMAIL PROTECTED])@Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 09:09:38AM -0800: > On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Wed, March 5, 2008 7:39 pm, Ralph Shumaker wrote > > I was under the impression (don't know if I ever heard it in an > educational setting) that "their" had become the gender-neutral > singular pronoun... kind of like how "sie" in German can be "she," > "you," or "they" depending on context and capitalization. So it's not > that "everyone" is treated as plural, it's that "their" is treated as > singular. > The pronoun "they" is still 3rd person plural. The use of it as a genderless (and, I think, numberless) pronoun is idiomatic when referring to people, otherwise it's simply ungrammatical. It's ubiquitous, accepted, and has been around for a long time. It's one of those things that couldn't be reversed by any amount of argumentation, so I let it go. I'd rather use "they" than "it". "Everyone should bring its raincoat."... yech. :-)
> > Another ugly trend is the loss of the plural forms of to be. I can't tell > > you how many times I hear supposedly edicated people say: > > "educated," maybe? :-D > > > There's three reasons we shouldn't do that. > > > > Of course, this should be: > > There are three reasons ... > > I think that the main reason for this is just laziness in speech. I > tend to be the type that composes sentences in my head before saying > them out loud (which I suppose is why I often say little), but a lot > of people these days start talking before they have a thought fully > formed. People start off a sentence with "there's," not yet having > considered the multi-item list they're about to come up with > on-the-fly. This exchange is what finally drew me into the thread. I don't think laziness is the culprit. Instead, I think that all of us compose our utterances on the fly, phrase by phrase. (And this is specifically referring to speech; writing is another game.) I doubt that anyone anywhere composes all spoken sentences before uttering them. Composing thoughts seems to happen in only some speakers, and I think that is what you are most likely referring to when you talk about "composing sentences". I suppose a short sentence could be completely composed if it were a single thought, but I'm still not sure at what point the thought becomes language. What you seem to be describing is what I've heard called a "super-monitor" by linguists who study 2nd language acquisition. I have that ability and it has helped me quite a bit. As to the plural of "be", I see much more of that abuse specifically when used in a contraction like the example shows. I can imagine hearing "There's clouds in the sky," but not, "houses is expensive." My point is that I don't think we're really losing the plural, but that we're abusing this particular construct. The thing that I /do/ think we are losing is the subjunctive. Few people use it at all any more. You can hear people commonly say things like, "if it was raining, we'd get wet." With the subjunctive it would be: "if it *were* raining, we'd get wet." Another common use of subjunctive shows up in old oaths that are still in use, like: "till death do us part". I don't hear it used this way at all in speech. Wade Curry syntaxman -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
