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- Oct 14, 2010
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- English Teacher
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[FONT="]BC: The ghosts of prescriptive grammarians. I can't understand what their accomplishments or lack thereof have to do with the existence of logic in languages.[/FONT]
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[FONT="]5jj: If someone in a usingenglish.com thread says that one interpretation of an utterance must ‘logically’ be different from another, then, I do not think it totally irrelevant to suggest that this was what prescriptive grammarians used to do. [/FONT]
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[FONT="]I had expressed my view that there was a difference between he is no taller than and he is not taller than. I admit that ‘logically’ there is no difference, but that does not prove that there isn’t, as we saw with he is no teacher and he is not a teacher[FONT="].[/FONT][/FONT]
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[FONT="]BC: Do you find it inappropriate to call illogical the following reasoning?
Tom is taller than me. Therefore, I am shorter than Tom.[/FONT]
[FONT="] [FONT="]5jj: [/FONT][FONT="]Not at all. I have never suggested that. But that is a different example from the one we were discussing[/FONT][FONT="].[/FONT][FONT="]Would you rather say that logic has nothing to do with its acceptability? [/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="]Not in this example. BC, if we try to prove the (un)acceptability of certain utterances by logic, we would have to conclude that the interrogative form of I am is amn’t I? but it’s not – the acceptable form is aren’t I?[/FONT]
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[FONT="]5jj: If someone in a usingenglish.com thread says that one interpretation of an utterance must ‘logically’ be different from another, then, I do not think it totally irrelevant to suggest that this was what prescriptive grammarians used to do. [/FONT]
[FONT="] [/FONT]
[FONT="]I had expressed my view that there was a difference between he is no taller than and he is not taller than. I admit that ‘logically’ there is no difference, but that does not prove that there isn’t, as we saw with he is no teacher and he is not a teacher[FONT="].[/FONT][/FONT]
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[FONT="]BC: Do you find it inappropriate to call illogical the following reasoning?
Tom is taller than me. Therefore, I am shorter than Tom.[/FONT]
[FONT="] [FONT="]5jj: [/FONT][FONT="]Not at all. I have never suggested that. But that is a different example from the one we were discussing[/FONT][FONT="].[/FONT][FONT="]Would you rather say that logic has nothing to do with its acceptability? [/FONT][/FONT]
[FONT="]Not in this example. BC, if we try to prove the (un)acceptability of certain utterances by logic, we would have to conclude that the interrogative form of I am is amn’t I? but it’s not – the acceptable form is aren’t I?[/FONT]