When does poor grammar become evolving language?
In: 1546
In the field of linguistics, there is no such thing as poor grammar. We study language from a scientific perspective to build models of how language works. If we have a certain grammatical rule, and we notice people breaking that rule, we don’t write them off as speaking wrong, we have to reformulate our understanding of the language to accommodate it. As scientists, we don’t throw out data because we don’t like it.
Labeling speech as incorrect rather than trying to figure out why it happens that way is just as nonsensical as an economist or sociologist encountering an unusual, unpredicted behavior and simply telling them they’re behaving wrong rather than investigating what they are doing and building a more complete, correct model of human behavior.
When the speakers and the grammatical rules conflict, it’s not the speakers who have a problem.
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