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Jul 2020
9:20am, 14 Jul 2020
6,592 posts
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Northern Exile
Yeah, I was wondering if in your example you were citing something that might be construed as a completed action but used an imperfective verb. It's a bit like the "I was looking for that all day" example, you've now found the mystery object (therefore completed the action) but use an imperfective verb to properly describe the action.
The language tuition I got in the forces was superb and I recognise that now. At Bristol uni they had a superb slavonic languages section, including several native speakers - they were also excellent, I can't fault them really.
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Jul 2020
9:32am, 14 Jul 2020
51,111 posts
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GlennR
I suffer from a surplus of native speakers in my life, although the quality of grammar of the well-educated Cambridge crowd is rather more refined than that of the extended family in the North Caucasus.
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Jul 2020
9:38am, 14 Jul 2020
51,001 posts
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Diogenes
I don’t understand English grammar. I’ve never managed to learn another language beyond getting a C grade in my French O Level, which doesn’t mean I can write or converse in it.
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Jul 2020
10:01am, 14 Jul 2020
51,114 posts
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GlennR
Dio, you do understand English grammar, because you write good English. As I’m always pointing out here, our grammar is descriptive, not normative. Unlike Russian.
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Jul 2020
10:04am, 14 Jul 2020
51,004 posts
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Diogenes
I only manage that because I’ve always read a lot, I don’t know what I’m doing, I just copy.
Can you explain descriptive and normative in this context?
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Jul 2020
10:22am, 14 Jul 2020
51,115 posts
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GlennR
Yes. English grammar as described in a book, usually intended for foreign learners, is a summary of what we do, not what should be. That’s descriptive. Any form of English spoken by native speakers cannot be ‘wrong’, although people’s economic prospects might be enhanced by learning one of the standard Englishes. I write Englishes because Edinburgh English is as good for that purpose as Home Counties.
Russian has a grammar that children have to learn from books and in class. That’s what I mean by normative.
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Jul 2020
10:24am, 14 Jul 2020
51,116 posts
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GlennR
Latin and Ancient Greece are normative from our point of view, but not necessarily for the original speakers.
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Jul 2020
10:28am, 14 Jul 2020
51,005 posts
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Diogenes
Thank you.
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Jul 2020
10:41am, 14 Jul 2020
27,903 posts
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JenL
The syntactic part of English Grammar is a bit like algebra - you move variables around to create different effects. The morphological part is very flexible and allows us to be highly creative in our word-formation. If anyone has ever said to you, or you've had the thought yourself that "That's not a (proper) word", don't take it at face value: people use lots of words that you won't find in a dictionary and many of them are the results of creative morphology, not necessarily confined to turning nouns into verbs or verbs into nouns.
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Jul 2020
10:59am, 14 Jul 2020
20,200 posts
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Dvorak
Linguaphile flexilexicans portmanteauly wordimorphical.
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Discovering you've been pronouncing a word wrong all your life
Jul 2024