Peter,

 

Your first sentence is an example of the importance of context.   Decontextuatlized it doesn’t sound good, but in conversation, I have heard and would readily say it.  The center for a women’s basketball team comes through the door, and I could see myself saying, “Girl is tall”.  The lack of the article is a function of the immediacy of the referent.  In your second sentence you have what is essentially a problem of morphophonemics, that is, the interaction sounds and morphological properties.  In this case, the a/an alternation, we have a morphophonemic rule that “an” loses its consonant if the next word begins with a consonant sound.  It’s about sounds, not letters.  It is grammatical only in a very broad sense that anything involving the structure of language is about grammar.

 

By the way, my description of the a/an alternation as n-deletion rather than n-insertion (“insert an /n/ before a word beginning with a vowel sound”) is historically the more accurate.  a/an comes historically from the Old English word for “one” , ân, and historically, during the Middle English period, the /n/ dropped before a consonant sound. 

 

One of the odd consequences, by the way, of the way we treat the grammar of “an” popularly has to do with words with an initial orthographic <h>.  We say “an honor” without the /h/.  But we say “a hospital” in this country but not in Britain, where it’s “an hospital”, without the /h/.  With the word “historic” the odd consequence has happened.  For some speakers, the /h/ gets dropped, and so “an” is used.  For other speakers, the /h/ is pronounced, and so “a” should be used since its before a consonant sound.  However, many speakers, including a lot of news readers, think that one is always supposed to use “an” before “historical” even if you pronounce the <h>.  This is, of course, a hypercorrection.  But it also illustrates what happens when the rules, descriptive or prescriptive, are not stated clearly. 

 

Herb

 

On 4/16/06, Peter Adams <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

On page 41 of Noguchi's Grammar and the Teaching of Writing, he distinguishes between two kinds of rules: descriptive rules of the English language and prescriptive rules about language.  He points out that a sentence like "Girl is the tall." violates descriptive rules and, therefore, is not an English sentence.  On the other hand, "Sam ain't going" violates the prescriptive rule against using "ain't," and so is an English sentence but just doesn't conform to the prescriptive rules.

I'm wondering what Noguchi would say about sentences like the following:

Girl is tall.
An girl is tall.

Which kind of rule do they violate?


Peter Adams
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