[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Subject-Verb agreement with compound subjects

[Lee Kaiwen]

Carol:
I want to add that Goddlefrood *may* be confusing "and" with "or."

CJ:
My own intuitions are in agreement with Geoff's -- of the three, 
"Neither he nor I are" is the only one that doesn't raise the 
metaphorical hackles of my native intuition, and would be my preference 
in cases where a rewrite were infeasible. If I might be so bold as to 
impose my own intuitions on the general populace, I suspect "are" would 
be the preference of a majority -- or at least a plurality -- of English 
speakers.

As you have suggested, the reason is almost certainly cognitive 
interference from the "He and I" pattern. Since expressions such as 
"Neither he nor I" are less common in English, we tend to "fill in the 
blanks" based on familiar or similar experiences.

But it doesn't really matter *why* "are" is the preferred choice. One 
might argue that most English speakers are wrong because the rule is 
right (or, as Geoff and I are wont, argue that the rule is wrong because 
English speakers are right). But in these sorts of tugs-of-war between 
the grammatical authorities and the linguistic proletariat, it is always 
the authorities who lose. The disappearance of case morphology itself is 
but one example: shifting English stress patterns had robbed case 
markers of their stress and, hence, their aural distinctiveness. No 
doubt the grammatical authorities of the day -- had they existed -- 
would have railed against every case of case abuse, but the "unwashed 
masses" (per Potioncat) couldn't be induced to much care about 
inflectional endings, with the result that they passed from widespread 
misuse into widespread disuse, and eventually fell out of the language. 
A development which Samuel Johnson, had he been alive at the time, would 
no doubt have rued as a sign of approaching linguistic Armageddon.

Other battles grammatical authorities have lost -- or have failed to win 
-- have been the abuse of the objective who (which, a generation ago, my 
English teachers were still trying to drill out of my head with their 
vituperations against expressions such as "Who'd he give that to?", as 
much for its dangling preposition as for its misuse of "who"); the split 
infinitive; alternative spellings such as "alright" (which even the OED, 
the vaunted successor to Johnson's tome as the guardian of English, now 
accepts with only a note that "some people" don't think it should be 
used formally); and the aforementioned dangling preposition ("Nonsense," 
as Churchill famously remarked, "up with which I will not put"). In the 
battle between the charismatic and the institutional, I'll bet on the 
charismatic every time. And in the quest for "standard" English, the 
people define, the authorities describe. If the people want to say, 
"None of them are going", then that's standard English, S-V disagreement 
notwithstanding.

Carol:
we would all be using our own spelling and grammar (which, alas, appears 
to be the case among many young Americans today who have not been taught 
grammar (standard usage), spelling, punctuation, or even penmanship.

CJ:
A sentiment I heard a generation ago and which, no doubt, has been 
echoed in every generation since 1755.

I'm not sure it's so much a case of youth not being taught "standard" 
grammar so much as youth not finding much use for it. But it is youth 
culture, with its chatspeak and disdain for "standard" grammar, that 
provides so much of the dynamism that drives English forward. Words like 
"manga", "chill pill", "ragazine" "tweener", "Goth" and "bludge" (all of 
which were added to the OED recently) were coined by twenty-somethings 
whose avowed purpose is often explicitly driven by an aversion to the 
"rules".

Carol:
Carol, who can think of no better way of determining a standard than a
consensus of the informed and educated.

CJ (ignoring the elitism implicit in the above):
Depending on how you choose to define "informed" and "educated", not to 
mention "standard". One wonders whether, say, Shakespeare, with his 
grammar school education (not to mention his contemporaries' derisive 
opionions vis-a-vis his use of English) would make the cut. Certainly 
the youth whose linguistic innovations you bemoan above are (assuming 
they finished high school) better educated than many of history's 
literary giants.

Standards exist to facilitate communication, it is true. But effective 
communication requires speaking your target audience's language. Where 
one wishes to communicate across the English-speaking world, or with 
academicians, then a mastery of "standard" English would be requisite. 
But if one wishes to dialogue with the chatspeak generation, insistence 
on the "standard" rules of English could actually be detrimental, and a 
well-placed "c u l8er" might communicate far more effectively than a 
bookful of Shakespearian citations.

Myself, I'd agree with you right up to the "consensus" part. But I'd 
wonder why the great "unwashed masses" were being excluded from defining 
the very language they speak. "Standard" is fine so long as, as Geoff 
said, the "informed and educated" are prepared to accept rather than 
arbitrate.

BTW, did you get a chance to look at the Haskell and MacDonald study I 
linked to? One of the intriguing results it found was that English 
speakers *do* exhibit a preference in disjunctives for nearer-noun 
agreement, but that the preference is significantly more pronounced when 
the plural noun is the nearer of the two. But the same "proximity 
effect" results as often in ungrammatical constructs as it does in 
grammatical -- such as the tendency toward agreeing with interposed 
objects of prepositions (e.g., "The pair of shoes are missing.")

potioncat:
You're going to let the unwashed masses decide? Oh, dear.
....Grammar and pronunciation will go out the window--erm winder.

CJ:
As far as the unwashed masses are concerned, it never *came in* the 
window. The masses have been speaking non-standard English -- and 
driving the evolution of the language -- since the days of Chancery 
English at least, notwithstanding (or much noticing) the disdain of 
grammatical authorities.

--CJ (who really is leaving for the States in a few hours and who will 
be unable to continue this fascinating discussion. Maybe.)