Pronominal 'This

HE QUESTION of how one knows what English is 'good English' continues to be vexing. I do not suppose that there are now any linguists who hold that 'good English,' 'Standard English,' must fit some logical or metaphysical or historical scheme apart from the test of usage. Everyone agrees that Standard English is the English spoken or written by the group taken as setting the standard. But at this point obvious difficulties and notable divergences arise. It has been frequently pointed out that there are, in fact, many standards within what we think of casually as a single language. For example, a child in elementary school may be confronted with a playground standard that is quite different from the standard of his dinner table at home; he may consequently alternate between two standards, saying 'I did it' so as not to be conspicuous at the dinner table, but 'I done it' so as not to be conspicuous on the playground. We must therefore say what standard we are talking about. I shall be concerned here with the standard of written American English of the middle of the twentieth century, the English that American English teachers intend to teach, the English reported in handbooks used currently in American colleges. Our first question may be stated thus: How do authors of handbooks know what to set down as Standard English? The cynical reader will reply: 'By reading what has been set down in other handbooks.' And no doubt there is some truth in this, that some writers of handbooks have no great concern for the facts of the language but merely reshape whatever fact and fiction have previously proved welcome to English teachers. We may dismiss this type of handbook from the present discussion, pausing only long enough to deplore its existence. There is another kind of handbook that is less deplorable than the first but probably no more satisfactory. This is the book which is simply an aggregate of the author's impressions and intuitions about the language. The author, presumably, wishes to report the language as it is, but he feels that to this end scientific investigation is unnecessary. Instead, he operates as a sensitized plate, develops his own linguistic consciousness, puts it in a book, and calls it Standard English. There are those who feel that this is as good a way as any to get at the facts of the language, but I am not one of them and I dismiss this kind of handbook also from the present discussion

Linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy