Ed,

I read your interesting posting yesterday and decided to give it a day
and then reread it.  I'm trying to understand what has spurred your
remarks so that I can get a better grasp on your argument.

You make the point that English speakers are dropping such lexical
contrasts and sensuous/sensual, etc.  As a linguist I have to declare
that I haven't read denunciations from my colleagues of teachers who
insist on teaching these contrasts.  Rather, much of it strikes me as an
important part of vocabulary building, a task that goes on well beyond
the BA.  I would correct in the writing of my students many misusages of
the sort you list.  While it is a truism that language changes and there
is little we can do about it, it also remains true that there is a
variant of English, call it standard if you will, that we expect
educated people to be able to read, write, and speak, at least in
appropriate social contexts.

I don't think all of these contrastive pairs have the same status.  The
"lie/lay" contrast is a contrast in transitivity.  Since the transitive
meaning ("lay") becomes clear as soon as the reader/hearer comes upon a
direct object, the redundant marking of transitivity means that the
distinction between lie/lay/lain(laid) and lay/laid/laid carries less
functional load and so is at risk of the forces of language change.  The
fact that in Modern English the strong past participle "lain" has
already been replaced by the weak past participle "laid" indicates that
this change has been in progress for some time.  In contrast, the
difference between the adjectives "disinterested" and "uninterested" is
not one that is redundantly marked in the structure of the sentence, and
so I expect careful users of English to make the distinction when it
needs to be made.  I don't know of an academic linguist who ignores the
conventions of Standard English in his or her own writing or in that of
their students (and I used "their" intentionally, since it goes back
about 400 years in this usage).  

You don't give a citation for your second quote below, "Educational
resistance to particular changes is futile," so I'm not sure what the
writer meant.  Is "particular" used in a generic sense "any particular"
or in a specific sense ("certain specified changes").  If the former,
the writer is clearly wrong.  My use of "his or her" above reflects a
socially driven change in usage.  Many of us continue to use "refute"
and "deny" to express the relevant distinction without having overtly
been taught it.  Even though I recognize the inexorableness of language
change, there are changes I resist and correct when I see them. I
personally can't abide "hone in on" for "home in on", a usage that goes
back only to the mid-20th c.

I do take exception to your claim that language undergoes decay.  I take
decay to mean irreversible entropy.  Signals undergo decay, as do all
other physical objects.  Words change, but when complexity is lost in
one area of a language, complex normally increases in another.  The
history of English illustrates this nicely.  Old English had a rich
system of case endings, six cases, on nouns, adjectives, and
determiners.  That system virtually disappeared in Middle English
because of normal, regular sound changes and some resulting analogical
changes.  One might say that case marking decayed during this period,
but what actually happened is that the relationships and meanings marked
by case endings in Old English came to be marked by word order and
prepositions in Middle and Modern English.  The complexity shifted from
morphology to syntax and lexis.  Languages have a necessary level of
complexity since they are a product of the complexity of human
cognition, but that complexity can show up in very different ways from
language to language.  The deny/refute distinction may well be one that
colloquial usage doesn't generally need and so is not made.  However,
more formal English does find it necessary to make the distinction, and
so learners are obligated to learn the distinction if they don't already
know it.  That's not so much a matter of language change or decay as of
difference in register.

I do agree with you rather strongly that Standard English has very
strong social class implications, many of them deleterious to those who
don't master that particular dialect.  A huge part of our educational
system is devoted to maintaining these class differences.

I hope I haven't misread you.

Herb




It is exceedingly common to find academic linguists who pour scorn on
teachers' attempts to correct students who confuse words, saying that it
is
pedantic to try and stem the inevitable onrush of language change.  For
example, they have in their sights anyone who would point out to their
students the semantic difference between such pairs as 'refute' and
'deny',
'sensuous' and 'sensual', 'uninterested' and 'disinterested'.  Another
pair
is the transitive verb 'lay' and the intransitive 'lie' -- over here in
England it used to be comparatively rare to hear someone say 'Lay on the
bed' or I've been laying here half an hour', instead of 'Lie on the bed'
or
'I've been lying here half an hour', but it is becoming increasingly
common
(I notice, for example, that Americans say 'the lay of the land' and not
'the lie of the land').

Some linguists, however, are straying from the scientific compound.  A
scientist should be examining the changes happening in the corpus of
words,
regardless of their causes.  Even a sociolinguist, interested in those
causes, does not take sides.  It is not for the  linguists to lay down
rules
about what should or should not be preserved.   If educators in some
society
find that it aids community feeling to inculcate a 'standard' speech and
are
concerned to produce the results they intend, that is just one of the
historical factors that a linguist would have to acknowledge, not a
feature
that he or she should be condemning out of hand as 'pedantic'.  They
have a
tendency to move from a statement like 'Change in language is a normal
process' (David Crystal, 'How Language Works, 2006, p. 483) which is
undeniable, to 'Educational resistance to particular changes is futile',
for
it might be perfectly 'normal' in a society to resist such changes.
They
say that one should not be using a word such as 'decay' of a language:
no,
not at the level of scientific inquiry, but yes, if one considers that,
say,
the distinction between 'refute' and 'deny' is valuable.  The continual
use
of 'refute' (which means to set out a would-be conclusive, carefully
argued
disproof of something) for 'deny' (which is merely to contradict
something
someone has said) might lead to a double loss -- the simultaneous
disappearance of the useful word 'deny' and of the meaning of 'refute',
for
which there is no adequate synonym.  Confusion of the two indicates
someone
who can have had no training of any kind in the rhetoric of argument,
surely
a necessity in a democracy.  Would it not be an instance of decay if
that
should come about?

I detect a neo-romantic ideology at work here:  its dream is of a
childhood
innocence as a delicate fruit the bloom of which must not be touched.
There
is also a mistaken class element that reads the attempt to teach
standard
English as elitist, interfering with the natural dialects of the
working-class.  I have found many students of working-class background
who
readily outstrip their middle-class schoolfellows in learning about
language, and end up being able to move from dialect to Standard English
and
back again without any loss of local colour in their pronunciation.
Among
their peers, of course, there are many who obstinately distort their
speech
to signal conformity with and loyalty to 'us' rather than 'them'.  Is
that
determination to be blessed as irresistible because it is 'normal'?

Edmond Wright

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