Peter,
   I'll anticipate a few points others might make. One is that a linguist
can describe differing practices through a concept like "register",
which explains why you and I might use a different language in the
locker room than we do in the mayor's office. (Though my mayor is
delightfully down to earth.) We also have regional and even class based
dialects. (Segregation led to dialect differences with people living
side by side.) Some of these are basolects and acrolects, dialects that
are looked down on or held in high regard.
   There was a big descriptive versus prescriptive debate around
dictionaries a few decades back. Nowadays, the dictionaries that matter
will describe people's attitudes toward language usage without taking a
stance of their own. (They might say a practiced is "considered"
inappropriate in formal contexts, or "colloquial", or "slang". It's an
observation, and a useful one.)
   We can do what I tried to do in my own book, which is give real world
examples and draw them from exemplary writers (John McPhee, Judith
Ortiz-Cofer, Annie Dillard, E. B. White, and so on.)
   We now have a number of corpus grammars, which can describe patterns in
a huge "corpus" of texts. Douglas Biber has been looking for
co-occurences of certain forms and finding an interesting way of
rethinking genre and register. All this is made possible by the
computer.
   But the descriptive versus descriptive debate really looks at a
misunderstanding from two differing positions. A formal or structural
grammar attempts to give a more accurate description of the forms of
the language than traditional grammar, and it is pretty much forced to
describe "use" to some extent in order to fine-tune its
classifications. In other words, can we classify "sent" as ditransitive
(She sent me a letter) and complex transitive (She sent me into
depression)can't be answered without looking at where we find the verb
and the meaning of the utterances where it occurs. But that is
primarily a descriptive approach.
   Bot cognitive and functional grammars are multi-dimensional. They pay
more attention to the innate role of grammar in the construction of
meaning (with meaning extended out to what is sometimes called
"pragmatics".) So a look at the gramamr is a look at how the mind works
and how people interact with each other and how we build anything like
a text.
   The operative question is not whether it is "correct", but how it
carries out the evolving purposes of the speaker or writer. Or even, in
a more general sense, how we are able to make sense of our world and
build our relations with each other.
   I see "more than one" as plural just because it could be replaced with
"two or more". Or maybe I just intuit it that way.
   And thanks for the praise of my book. Until I sent a book out into the
world, I had no idea how much feedback matters.

Craig  >

Craig,
>
> I will have to admit that I looked through your book (which I think is
> also
> "wonderful") for an example of "prescriptiveness" like the
> comparative/superlative "rule" I found in Martha's, and I couldn't find
> one.   You really do seem
> to have managed to write a book that is completely "descriptive."
>
> I'm just beginning to think about this topic, which I thought I understood
> completely until I started thinking about it.
>
> I did notice one curious detail in your book.   In your discussion of
> coordinate adjectives on page 146, you write, "when more than one occur .
> . ."   That
> sounded odd to me.   Is it possible that "more than one" is singular?   I
> would have written "when more than one occurs . . ."   Once again, as
> Joanna
> reminds us every once in a while, language isn't math.   If "more than
> one" is
> singular, then no wonder it took Jessperson needed seven volumes to try to
> describe it.
>
> And thanks, Craig, for fixing the subject line.   I always forget to do
> that.
>
> I look forward to your ten-page response.
>
> Peter Adams
>
>
>
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