Like many others on the list, I long ago stopped trying to communicate 
with Brad. He's wrong, and he'll never change his mind.

But I do think that there is some value for the teaching of grammar to 
be gained from understanding the nature of his assumptions. I submit 
that they reflect, in an exaggerated degree, attitudes about language 
that can be found in too many teachers. So while I personally don't give 
a damn about his ravings on the past perfect, we have to confront 
attitudes like his when we teach grammar. I have never yet had a class 
where at least some students' views of linguistic correctness have not 
been twisted by assumptions very similar to those held by Brad.

These are broader assumptions about the way language works, not those 
limited to technical points about the past-perfect:

1. There is a single, correct form for every construction. If two ways 
exist to express the same idea, one must be wrong.

2. If a word can be omitted without change of meaning, it must be 
omitted. For a non-past-perfect example, consider the complementalizer 
"that." I've lost track of the number of students I've encountered who 
have been taught that it _must_ be deleted from sentences like "The book 
that I saw on the table was printed in 1798."

3. Language error exists as an absolute and can be divined through logic 
(or perhaps I should say reasoning, since the actual mental process 
isn't all that logical). Usage is no excuse. Even if everyone does it, 
including all the great writers of the past, it's still an error if it 
violates some perceived point of logic.

4. Schools have the ability to make everyone use correct grammar if only 
it was taught, and so the persistence of error is evidence of the 
schools' failure.

5. Form and function exist (or should exist in error-free language) in a 
one-to-one mapping. The consequence of this assumption is that form and 
function (i.e., morphology & syntax on one side and semantics on the 
other) are routinely treated as interchangeable, at the cost of a huge 
conceptual muddle. For another example of this, consider the traditional 
treatment of tense, which school-book grammars typically imply is 
interchangeable with the concept of time.

It should be obvious that I'm convinced every one of these assumptions 
is incorrect. As grammar teachers we need to be aware of them, however. 
We serve our students badly if our own practice reinforces these notions.

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