Johanna,

It's good to hear from you again.  I hope everything is going well with
all that you're doing.

Your point about usage is dead on, of course.  An interesting sidelight
is the influence orthography has on our judgments of grammaticality.  I
suspect the sense that there should be agreement in English existential
arises from the fact that we spell what looks like a form of BE that in
speech has very little to do with BE anymore.

Sapir may have had a deeper point in mind with his maxim "All grammars
leak."  He was looking at the gap between the infinite flexibility of
language and the inadequate of the best of grammars to capture all of
any language.

Herb


It's been a while since I attended to ATEG messages, but I thought  
I'd jump in with a few more thoughts about pairs, scissors, etc.

First, the "all grammars leak" comment reflects people's unreasonable  
expectation that language rules be logical and without exception.  
Language just isn't that kind of system, not only because it is  
constantly in flux and varies across populations and situations, but  
because people construe things differently at different times, and  
because some patterns become entrenched regardless of whether they  
are logical or fit a paradigm or not. It's fun to go through lists  
like those that Peter has compiled and see what sounds good to whom,  
but the fact that judgments and usage are inconsistent is unremarkable.

As to "where's my scissors", the contracted forms "there's" and  
"where's" are, I believe, on the way to being unanalyzable wholes  
that function as existential introducers. In other languages, such  
expressions may be fixed phrases or single words that show no concern  
for agreement (I have Tunisian Arabic in mind, which has a single  
word that is invariable, and French, with it's entrenched "il y a" or  
"il y en a" (being a clause of which what follows is a verb  
complement, agreement with what follows is irrelevant). I don't know  
whether Spanish "ay" as in "ay dos perros" "there are two dogs" has  
any other forms.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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