[PLUG-TALK] A pair of pants (was: software program)

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:43:53 -0800
Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> dijo:

>On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:10:48AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>> JJJ, linguist semipotentiary, shutting up lest this become a lecture.
>
>Before you do, can you explain why my Wisconsinite wife thinks that the
>"these ones / those ones" construction is (a) a West-coast thing and
>(b) hilariously funny?

Yes, I can explain it. But first a few general thoughts.

I am a linguist. By definition that means that I am a descriptive
linguist. Descriptive linguists merely report and analyze what speakers
do with their language. There are no value judgments, no right or
wrong, no good or bad. There are no languages that are better or worse
than others; all languages are equally complex (with the exception of
pdigins and recently created creoles, but that is another story). We
merely smile at prescriptive grade school teachers convinced that they
are creating a better world by teaching their charges not to use
multiple negation, or say "people that," or any of a host of other
things that, in reality, have nothing to do with anything important.

As a case in point, consider multiple negation, as in "we don't never
need no more computers." is there any real reason not to use multiple
negation? In Spanish it is mandatory, yet Spanish speakers seem to have
no more problem communicating with each other than English speakers do.
And in Anglo-Saxon multiple negation was simply optional for emphasis.
It was not until just before Shakespeare, when self-appointed
grammarians first appeared, that it was suddenly announced that
multiple negation was "wrong." Grammar school teachers have been
stomping on it for the past 400 years, and it still lives on in
dialects. The point is that all the grammar rules that most everyone on
this list learned as children were silly and pointless.

Having said that, as a linguist, nothing that present speakers of 
English do should upset me. And generally nothing does. Except "these
ones" and "those ones." I think they grate on me because the people I
hear using them are usually employable only as burger-flippers, hence
my brain does a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. If only uneducated
speakers do it, it must be wrong. 

Now let me finally get to "these ones" and "those ones." English has a
strange set of demonstrative pronouns, and a noun phrase structure
that is even stranger. What is important to understand about the English
noun phrase is that it cannot be headless if there are modifiers other
than determiners. That means that you cannot say just the modifiers
without also saying the noun. A noun phrase may contain only a noun, or
a noun plus one or more modifiers, but if there are modifiers it must
have at least one noun at a minimum. Consider the following sentences
("*" means "ungrammatical):

	a) The very gray books were on the table.
	b) *The very gray were on the table.
	c) The very gray ones were on the table.

The point of the examples is that if you don't have a noun in a
noun phrase with modifiers you can still have a grammatical sentence if
you substitute the pro form "one" or "ones" for the noun. In other
words, "one" or "ones" must be employed to fulfill the requirement that
a noun phrase with modifiers cannot be headless.

Now, the strange part of this rule is that the singular and plural forms
of the demonstratives ("this" and "that," "these" and "those") follow
the rule: The pro form "one" is mandatory to make a legal noun phrase
if there are modifiers other than determiners. 

	d) This very gray one is on the table.
	e) These very gray ones are on the table.

But when you have a demonstrative and you remove all other modifiers you
get a different picture. The plurals _cannot_ take the pro forms
"ones." It makes no sense, but there you have it:

	f) This one is on the table.
	g) *These ones are on the table.

That (g) is ungrammatical is senseless. It is an exception to the rule.
Speakers of languages abhor exceptions. There is always a natural
tendency to level out exceptions. Speakers who say "these ones" and
"those ones" are merely making the paradigm regular. If anything, they
deserve applause for making the language simpler and more elegant. 

Still, it makes me think of high school dropouts flipping burgers. :(