Google search results: treat with a large pinch of salt

When deciding whether a certain construction or phrase is natural English or not, it makes sense to check how it is actually used. One way of doing this is to use corpora, but they can be quite complicated for laymen like me to use.

And as we have this wondeful 'corpus' that is the Internet, it is tempting to use search result counts, as well as web-based tools like Ngram Viewer, to make comparative assessments as to how language is used.

What's more, it's not only non-specialists like me who do this; Google search counts are not infrequently used by professional linguists at the linguistics blog Language Log, for example. But it turns out we need to be very careful.

Personal pronouns - subject or object? - A discussion.

In few areas can the divide between traditional grammar and actual usage be as wide as in the 'case' of personal pronouns. Here we take a look at why.

EFL course books and websites usually steer clear of language controversies, no doubt so as not to confuse students. But for me this is part of what makes grammar such a lively subject, and as you are advanced students, I think you can 'take it', so here goes.

Narrative tenses are there for a reason - to drive the narrative

Were you looking for exercises? - This post is a discussion about a particular example of narrative tense use. If you were looking for some exercises on narrative tenses, I have posted some here.

Discussion - Polish students sometimes complain about the English tense system, asking why we need so many? Their point being that Polish only has three tenses.

My own theory is that Polish actually has five tenses, because many verbs come in pairs, one in imperfective aspect (with three forms, roughly equivalent to present simple/continuous, past continuous and future continuous) and the other in perfective aspect (with two forms, roughly equivalent to past simple and future simple).

But they are listed separately in dictionaries, so I imagine Poles consider them, no doubt rightly, to be separate verbs.

In any case it's considerably less than English's 12, more if you count used to, going to etc. (I expect I should have said fewer there rather than less, but less was what first came to mind, and sounds more natural to me, so it stays.)

I came across a short passage the other day that illustrates rather well, I think, the advantages a rich palette of tenses can give. It was on the language blog Pain in the English (link below), where people ask questions about 'grey areas in English', and others give their opinions. I recently joined in one of the discussions

In language, two and two can be four, or a foursome, or a quartet or maybe two couples, but it doesn't equal anything

I recently saw this extraordinary statement on a language blog:

We have often noted that often repeated language and grammar errors seem to become “correct” usage. Wouldn’t it be weird if math used that philosophy? When enough people said 2+2=5, it would! It would still equal 4, of course, but it would also equal 5.

Quite extraordinary! And I’m not referring to the frequency of the word often. Nor to the quotation marks around 'correct' and the corresponding lack of them round 'errors'. But to the fact that somebody would want to compare language to maths.

Some words are simply outwith some people's understanding. A rant in defence of the word 'outwith'.

Related post

If you'd prefer to read a more concise post about outwith, you can find a few examples and various links at another (much shorter) post I wrote on this subject more recently: Q and A - Is outwith a word

I was once explaining the Edinburgh Festival to some English friends. I told them about the ‘Official festival’; this is how people in Edinburgh refer to the Edinburgh International Festival. For most people in Edinburgh, the Festival is really the Fringe, cheaper (although less so nowadays) and less High Culture. Anyway, I went on to say that there was also the Fringe Festival, the Book Festival, a film festival and God knows what other festival, but that they were all outwith the main (official) festival. And they looked at me in a strange way. ‘You mean they’re not part of the main festival?’. Yes, I said, rather puzzled, for these were educated people and I had no idea that there was anything particularly special about outwith. So I looked in my trusty Chambers, and it was only then that I discovered that outwith was a Scottish word.

Do U h8 txt msging lingo or do U thnk its just gr8?

I recently did a lesson on the language of texting (SMS) - and Internet slang - LOL, BTW  etc, and got to thinking about how old the use acronyms and abbreviations is. Acronyms, BTW, are those abbreviations that are said as a word. So the UN is an abbreviation (we say the individual letters), but UNESCO is an acronym, we say it as a word. In English we tend to use fewer acronyms, than for example French, where they seem to be able to make every group of letters into words.