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

[Lee Kaiwen]

Carol responds:
Yeah, I know. Those examples are ugly and awkward and I would rephrase
them. They are, nevertheless, correct.

CJ (Now):
Being trained in linguistics more so than grammar, I find I have an
innate distrust of prescriptive rules. Of the above, I'd ask, "'Correct'
according to *whom*?" When a prescriptive rule such as the one under
discussion produces a result so utterly at odds with common usage, I
tend to discount the rule, no matter how many distinguished authorities
have repeated it.

Carol:
And, of course, *someone* invented the rules of grammar. I think it
was primarily eighteenth-century grammarians trying to impose logic on
English.

CJ (Now):
As something of a populist when it comes to language, I'd reply that the
"someone" who invented the rules of grammar is the entire collective of
native English speakers past and present, and I suspect
eighteenth-century grammarians had very little to do with it. To that
end, I think your "impose on" lies at the heart of the issue. As an
intellectual exercise, I can understand the attraction toward trying to
tease a sense of order out of something as frequently chaotic as a
living, evolving language. But then turning around and trying to impose
that order back upon a language which is often far too busy doing its
job to be much bothered with whether it's acting logically can be
largely an exercise in frustration. And can come across as elitist, to
boot. The French Loi Toubon is, I think, a particularly salient case in
point.

Historically, in fact, languages -- at least English, with whose history
I'm most familiar -- have tended to do a pretty good job cleaning up
their own acts. In reference to another recently-discussed point, case
morphology disappeared from English simply because common folk no longer
found them useful, and I can just picture the frustration of a
ninth-century grammarian watching case morphology fade away from his
beloved Anglo-Saxon despite his best efforts to mark down any student
failing to employ it.

Hmm ... I hope the above didn't come off as a rant. It wasn't intended
to be. I find grammar rules most useful when they're providing insight
into how English actually functions; when a rule diverges from reality,
it has, for me, lost both its authority and its point. Here's an example
of a discussion of Subject-Verb agreement from a linguistic perspective
-- the sort of intellectual discussion I find much more stimulating that
a referral to grammar books.

http://lcnl.wisc.edu/publications/archive/83.pdf

(Note also that the above discussion uses makes reference to "dative
objects" for largely the same reason I do -- it's useful to do so,
irrespective of the fact that English no longer possesses a case
morphology.)

But particularly from my perspective as an ESL educator it seems the
height of absurdity to see my students marked down on their exams for
NOT using such offensive constructs as "Neither he nor I am", just
because some grammar book says that's English. (I'm not speaking
hypothetically; the construct "Neither he nor I am" appears quite
regularly on exams and homework assignments in Taiwan, always as the
correct answer.) Egregious in particular because my students have no
native intuition to tell them how absurd the rule -- or at least its
result -- is.

Carol:
I suggest that you hunt up an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English
grammar, preferably Lowth's or Murry's (which should be available in
your university's library)...

CJ (Now):
<Chuckle> Living in Taiwan, I unfortunately don't have access to a
university possessing two-century-old English grammar texts.

Carol:
to see what those books say about subject/verb agreement in compound
subjects joined by "or."

CJ (Now):
I think I can guess what they might say. But, as I indicated above, I
find myself more interested in how English deals with the issue than
with how grammarians do.

Carol:
And while you're at it, you might check to see how they
label the pronoun cases. I very much doubt that you'll find accusative
or dative!

CJ (Now):
Rats! I've lost the original reply I was composing on this. I'll just
have to summarize.

I don't know what nineteenth century grammar texts have to say about
accusative and dative, as I regrettably do not have access to a
representative 19th-century corpus. As I mentioned in a previous post,
the citation you provided earlier strongly suggests that at least some
19th-century grammarians were still employing dative and accusative
categories, else why would its author bother with a defense of objective
case at all, with a specific rant directed toward accusative and dative
cases? But I cannot verify my suspicions.

Having said that, however, I am *not* trying to argue that English,
either now or at any time in the last millenium -- has accusative and
dative cases. Certainly I agree that the *morphology* of case has long
disappeared. However, English *has* been shaped by its accusative/dative
past, and there are peculiarities of modern grammatical constructs which
(I find) are harder to explain without reference to English's case past.

I guess my experience with teaching accusative and dative has been
largely the opposite of yours. Generally, my students have little
difficulty grasping the concepts, since they've already mastered the
nearly identical concepts of direct and indirect objects. And I can
generally teach all my students need to know about accusative and dative
in under ten minutes.

--CJ