Peter,
   I don't have the books in front of me (I have them at home), but I 
believe the corpus grammars try to be wide in scope and also include 
spoken English.
   A good deal of language is unconscious, and perhaps needs to be for 
us to function within various contexts, but that does not mean it is 
innate or neutral. In fact, I think we are socialized into language, and 
the most interesting question is not why people all share the same 
language, but why people who grow up in different communities often 
can't understand each other at all. Language evolves, and it does so 
because we all participate in it in substantial ways. It is dynamic.
   The current progressive position is that the few rules that differ 
from this unconscious system can be "corrected" in context, with little 
need to study (consciously understand) the unconscious system. I believe 
this is wrong for a number of reasons. The punctuation system, as one 
case in point, is based on syntactic rules (for the most part.)  When 
students don't intuit them (as most students don't) we have no way to 
talk about them. We also can't help them appreciate the complexity of 
their own language if we simply correct it when it differs from the 
standard. Current biases and prejudices are reified under those 
conditions. We also have no way to talk about the complex relationship 
between the choices we make and the meanings we make.
   It's ironic, I guess, but I don't think you can get to "correctness" 
directly. It is not and should not be the main goal, but it also remains 
a stubborn problem if it's all you mean by "grammar." That may be what 
the anti-grammar studies can tell us; if correctness is all you are 
after, you are pretty much bound to fail. If an undersrtanding of 
language is what you are after, then correctness will fall into its 
proper place.

Craig



Peter Adams wrote:
>
> In a message dated 6/24/07 8:42:04 AM, [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>
>    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.)
>
>
> What I am wrestling with is this.  As I understand it, the difference 
> between "grammars" like yours, Martha's, Klammer's, and the 
> Cambridge--the four I'm familiar with--and the grammars in handbooks 
> like the Bedford, the Little, Brown, or the Simon & Schuster is that 
> the former are attempting to "describe" the grammar of English, 
> without bias toward educated, middle-class dialects, but rather to 
> describe English as it is produced by English speakers and writers.  
> On the other hand, the handbooks are trying to describe the 
> privileged, educated English of those in power--"correct" or "good" 
> grammar.
>
> In most cases, I think this distinction is accurate (despite 
> occasional lapses when descriptive grammars include a little 
> prescription and despite the fact that they tend to be based on 
> corpora that are fairly privileged); however, I am beginning to think 
> that this distinction is not nearly as important as another one.
>
> The grammar rules that students have trouble with--the familiar 
> punctuation and apostrophe errors, agreement errors, frags and 
> run-ons, etc--are a very small percentage of the total grammar rules 
> of the language.  As everyone agrees, most rules are followed 
> unconsciously be writers who are not even aware they exist.  Writers 
> flawlessly form passive voice sentences from active, imbed clauses in 
> other clauses, line up prenominal adjectives according to a fairly 
> rigid hierarchy, and form tag questions out of statements, to list 
> just a few of these unconscious rules.
>
> It seems to me that the primary difference between the two types of 
> grammars I have been discussing (what Martha calls Grammar 2 and 
> Grammar 3) is that Grammar 2s are primarily concerned with those 
> unconscious rules that govern how we produce and transform language 
> while Grammar 3 is concerned primarily with the much smaller set of 
> rules that writers sometimes violate leading them to depart from the 
> conventions of Standard Written English.  I would add that the bulk of 
> these Grammar 3 rules seem to be the result of differences between the 
> spoken and the written language. 
>
>
>
> Peter Adams
>
>
>
>
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