--- "Simon G. J. Smith" <smithsgj@eee.bham.ac.uk>
wrote: >
> conference. But in general, surely, the native
> speaker variety of a language is in some sense the
> correct one, and thereby automatically has a
> different status from that of other varieties.
> Otherwise what yardstick, in the descriptive
> tradition, do we have for judging what is
> well-formed and what is not? Anything is permissible
Indeed, even "nativeness" can't be used as a
reasonably good "yardstick". For example, a large
number of native speakers of British English
persistently can't use the apostrophe correctly.
For this matter, "educatedness" may need to be applied
as a yardstick. But again, how educated? I'm sure most
of the users mentioned above received some "standard"
education.
So, if "well-formedness" is the issue, maybe the
prescriptive approach serves the purpose better.
Regards,
Alex
=====
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