English usage controversies

A case of disputed English grammar arises when there is disagreement about whether a given construction constitutes correct English.

Such disagreements are often quite impassioned; speakers are often very defensive of the rules of grammar that they learned in school. Even when there is no evidence of a dispute over whether a construction is correct, English speakers sometimes experience anger on encountering grammatical errors.^{[1], [2]}

Arguments

There are a number of fairly long-standing cases of disputed English grammar (some of which are summarized below), and each has its own peculiarities; nonetheless, people use, and historically have used, many of the same arguments in justifying their positions in various cases. Common arguments include the following:

Since the rules of grammar are largely conventional, constructions seen as older and better established are often seen as superior; by contrast, those seen as recent innovations (see Neologism) are often criticized, usually because they are originally associated with speakers who are uneducated or unfamiliar with the traditional rules.
Use by widely respected authors often lends credibility to a construction (but not always; for example, not if an author is perceived as intentionally writing in a non-standard style, such as an eye dialect). Conversely, in a dispute between two competing constructions, an author's use of one construction may be perceived as a point against the other.
In cases involving the syntax to be used with specific words (e.g., the preposition that is to be used after a given adjective), the etymology of the word might be seen as supporting one construction over another. (See List of English words with disputed usage.)
Since English has no central language authority, common usage is often seen as defining correctness: Many people feel that if a usage is sufficiently common, it is by definition correct.
Historically, Latin was highly respected for its elegance, and many current points of dispute (notably the injuction against split infinitives) involve rules of Latin that were transposed onto English in an effort to make English more elegant. This line of argument is no longer common.
Often speakers will argue that a certain usage is inherently more logical than another, or that it is more consistent with other (undisputed) usages.
Constructions that can produce ambiguities in some circumstances are sometimes seen as best avoided in all circumstances.
Perceived hypercorrections — the avoidance of a usage that the speaker thinks is incorrect but that the hearer does not — are nearly always viewed negatively, and often seen as pretentious.

That said, speakers frequently do not consider it necessary to justify their positions on a usage, taking as a priori that a given usage is correct or incorrect. Also, such arguments are often complicated by speakers' reliance on their faulty impressions of linguistic facts, such as the impression that an expression is newer than it really is.^[3]

Prescription and description

One very common clash is between prescriptivist approaches, which seek to prescribe how English should be spoken, and descriptivist approaches, which seek how to describe how English is spoken. One can imagine two extreme positions, one being that even if every sentence of actual English used a construction, that construction could still be incorrect, and the other being that any English sentence that is ever uttered is part of the English and language and hence by definition correct.^[4] In practice, however, speakers lie between the two extremes, believing that since English changes with time and is governed in large measure by convention, a construction must be considered correct once it is universal, but also that a given sentence can be "incorrect" in that it violates the conventions of English.

Different forms of English

One complicating factor is that there are many different forms of English, often with different conventions; what is plainly grammatical in one form may be plainly ungrammatical in another.

English internationally

English is spoken worldwide, but the English of one country is not always the English of another; for example, in addition to the differences in accent, spelling, and vocabulary, there are many points of grammar where American dialects and British ones differ. Ordinarily, speakers will accept many national dialects as "correct," but may deem only one to be correct in a given setting, in the same way that an English-speaker might regard French as correct without considering it as correct English. Nonetheless, disputes can sometimes arise; for example, it is now a matter of some debate in India whether American or British English is the more correct form (even though Indian English has largely become its own dialect separate from either).

Regional dialects and ethnolects

Template:Globalize/USA

In contrast to their general high level of tolerance for the dialects of other English-speaking countries, American English speakers often express disdain for features of certain regional dialects, such as Southern English's use of y'all as the second-person plural personal pronoun. (Such disdain is not restricted to points of grammar; speakers often criticize regional accents and vocabulary as well.)

Similarly, seemingly due to a deep misunderstanding of the nature of African-American Vernacular English (Ebonics), many Americans do not view it as a legitimate language form, viewing it as lazy English, as slang, or as inherently ungrammatical.^[5] However, while it obviously makes no sense to say that a given dialect is ungrammatical, it can be said that many features of Ebonics are not grammatical in Standard English.

In both cases, arguments must center around questions of what constitutes Standard English; for example, since fairly divergent dialects from many different countries are widely accepted as Standard English, it is not always clear why certain regional dialects, some very similar to their standard counterparts, are not.

Register

Different constructions are acceptable in different registers of English; for example, a given construction will often be seen as too formal or too informal for a given situation.

Speakers do not always distinguish between "correct" English and the English of formal registers; for example, they might say that a given construction is incorrect, and unacceptable in formal writing, but acceptable in ordinary writing or in everyday speech. Alternatively, they might say that a given construction is correct, and acceptable in ordinary writing or in everyday speech, but that it is too informal for some uses. Whereas linguists will often describe a construction as being correct in a certain register but not in another, English speakers as a whole tend to view "correct English" as a single entity — either viewing informal registers as allowing deviations from correctness, or viewing formal registers as imposing additional syntactic constraints beyond mere correctness, or both.