Would you board the USS Linguistic Prescriptivism?

Grammar, the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the USS Linguistic Prescriptivism. Its ongoing mission: to diagram strange new sentences; to seek out split infinitives and Oxford commas; to correct boldly what no grammarian has corrected before!

#startrek #meme #humor #grammar #prescriptivism #linguistics

A few entries from the language section of The Standard Dictionary of Facts, published 1920 and recently purchased by me. Looking forward to reading through all the prescriptivist entries to see what sort of language use people were fretting about over a century ago.

(I particularly love the entry for “dearest”, which made me laugh out loud.)

#language #linguistics #prescriptivism #lexicography

Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland

From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):

let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”

I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.

Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?

Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)

Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)

Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.

How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:

a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.

An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.

This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.

[image source]

Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.

Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.

Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)

Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)

So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.

Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.

I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)

And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)

A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.

My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.

If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)

Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)

Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.

Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.

Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”

In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.

Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?

https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945

*

Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.

Updates:

Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):

“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]

The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”

Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.

At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”

I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:

#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing

Präskriptive Linguistik im Supermarkt?

„Dass sich Konsumenten nicht bevormunden lassen, zeige das Beispiel Hafermilch: Von der EU gesetzlich zum Drink gemacht, blieb sie im Alltag fest als Milch verankert.“

https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000289358/eu-will-veggieburger-umbenennen-und-erntet-international-harten-widerstand

#linguistics #prescriptivism #vegan

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/good-2
I mean, linguists are scientists. Obviously they are going to take a descriptive approach to what they study. That doesn't mean normal people have to.

#linguistics #prescriptivism

Trick question (or not): who could seriously still be at this in 2025 (well, 2024 technically as per the copyright)?

#linguistics #prescriptivism @linguistics

I wrote a note on a student’s text about “amount” and “number", and I was going to write it up as a daily post, but then I wondered if I already had written about the topic—and I did, back in 2021.

#English #Amount #Number #CountNouns #NonCountNouns #Grammar #Prescriptivism #Descriptivism #Language #Linguistics

https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2021/05/amount-number-and-count-and-non-count.html

The trouble with dangling modifiers

On many vexed matters of English usage, people can be divided into the following groups:

1. those who neither know nor care
2. those who do not know, but care very much
3. those who know and condemn
4. those who know and approve
5. those who know and distinguish.

Thus with wry wit did H. W. Fowler address the existence of split infinitives in his landmark usage dictionary of 1926. He concluded that the first group ‘are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes’.

Dangling catkins in the rural west of Ireland

Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.

As a copy-editor I’m in category 5: I routinely edit danglers to accord with the norms of formal written English. But they’re not always a flagrant error, and they’ve occurred in English since at least Chaucer’s day.

Let’s take a closer look.

(A note on terminology: The modifier is typically a participle but may be a clause, an infinitive, a gerund, etc. It may be described as dangling, hanging, confused, misplaced, misattached, unattached, unrelated, misrelated, etc. – though, depending on the source, ‘dangling’ and ‘hanging’ may apply only when the intended subject is implied, not just unattached. As a general shorthand, there’s ‘danglers’.)

Many danglers cause little or no harm and are ambiguous only with a feat of imagination. For example:

While replying to your email, the doorbell rang.

The dangling gerund suggests that the doorbell was replying to the email, but it’s commonsensical to infer that the writer was doing so. The questionable grammar is likely to go unnoticed and unremarked upon in informal contexts but might be fixed if the prose were edited:

While I was replying to your email, the doorbell rang.

Sometimes what’s attached to the dangler is not a noun but a dummy ‘it’ or ‘there’:

Looking over the results, there seems to be a consensus.

Who was looking over the results is unclear from the isolated sentence, but it’s probably obvious in context. Dangling participles like this draw the attention of readers sensitized to the problem, such as editors, sticklers, and grammatically versed readers, but go unnoticed by the majority.

To open the lid, it must be pushed down, then turned counter-clockwise.

This dangling infinitive could be phrased more grammatically (To be opened, the lid must…; To open the lid, you must push it down…), but there’s no real confusion or difficulty. As G. H. Vallins writes of the general structure in The Pattern of English (1956), ‘provided the result is not patently incongruous, it is not too lightly to be condemned’.

Some will condemn it anyway, in all possible cases, but there are fewer absolutes in English usage than is commonly supposed. Much hinges on style and context, and what is idiomatic need not be straitjacketed.

Contemporary prescriptive authorities also allow wiggle room. Garner’s Modern English Usage quotes danglers from the prose of canonical authors and reputable grammarians, and says some ‘are acceptable because of long-standing usage’, e.g., Considering the current atmosphere in the legislature, the bill probably won’t pass.

To considering can be added concerning, assuming, allowing for, speaking of, owing to, and many such phrases that have acquired ‘a prepositional or adverbial force’, Vallins writes. These, he continues,

may introduce a phrase that is syntactically independent of a noun or pronoun in the main sentence . . . . It follows that there are borderline cases; and since this is so, there would seem to be some justification for any loosely related participle whose phrase is more adverbial than adjectival in function.

Now, about those pitfalls. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage says that unconscious humour is ‘the one pitfall that must be avoided’ – like the truck on a bicycle, in my invented example. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English concurs: ‘It’s the funny ones that cause trouble.’

We might profitably take that to mean funny ha-ha or funny peculiar. Some cases may not be amusing but are surreal, nonsensical, or otherwise jarring. And to these may be added juxtapositions that are genuinely confusing or ambiguous: though rare, they do occur.

I’ll present a couple of examples I saw recently. The funny or surreal type appeared in a Quiz of the Week in the Irish Times of 12 April 2025:

Some 12,000 years after it became extinct, a Dallas-based biotech company claimed this week they have resurrected what as the “world’s first successfully de-extincted species”?
(a) Velociraptors.
(b) Dire wolves.
(c) Woolly mammoths.
(d) Travel agents.

Photo of the print copy:

To be clear, a Dallas-based biotech company did not, as far as we know, go extinct 12,000 years ago – but that’s what the line implies. This is the ‘unconscious humour’ that MWDEU warns against. Among the ways the line could be felicitously rephrased is to simply move the modifier to the end:*

A Dallas-based biotech company claimed this week they have resurrected what as the “world’s first successfully de-extincted species”, some 12,000 years after it became extinct?

As automatic as the misreading may be, no one is likely to seriously interpret the line that way, though they may pause for reanalysis when they find the sentence’s grammatical subject – a Dallas-based biotech company – to be wildly different from anything the modifier had primed them to expect.

Next is the confusing type. This one, from Pat Falvey and Pemba Gyalje Sherpa’s book The Summit: How Triumph Turned to Tragedy on K2’s Deadliest Days, starts with the word ‘Sacked’; I include a few lines before it for context:

Ever since he had climbed out of his tent at 2am, Jehan [Baig] had not been feeling well. His expedition leader, Hugues D’Aubarède, had asked him to bring some extra oxygen bottles to the top of the Bottleneck. He had just done so and now he wanted nothing more than to get back to his tent. Jehan’s visit to K2 had been a litany of misfortunes and mishaps.

Sacked by the Singaporean team for an alleged failure to comply with instructions and for poor climbing techniques, his friend and mentor, Shaheen Baig, had secured a place for him on Hugues’ team.

The syntax implies that the Singaporean team sacked Shaheen Baig, but in fact they sacked Jehan Baig. Luckily, the broader context shows this, and the information is conveyed unambiguously elsewhere in the book. But if the line were taken out of context, or read inattentively, it could easily lead one astray. The two names’ similarity deepens the difficulty.

Through this example you can see the potential for damage – to meaning, to reputation – when writers are unmindful of misplaced modifiers. Genuinely ambiguous cases are fortunately not common, because context usually clarifies things. And copy-editors reduce their numbers, which, paradoxically, may make the phenomenon more obscure than it otherwise would be.

As it is, innocuous danglers are common, especially in unedited writing. And they will inevitably jar on some readers. Benjamin Dreyer, in Dreyer’s English, deems them ‘the most common error committed in otherwise competent prose and by far the most egregious type of error that regularly makes it to print’.

Many danglers are like the one below, which I read this morning in a film review. I’ve altered the details while preserving the syntactic essence:

The plot follows Kim as she returns to her hometown after a period of travel. Looking for direction, her mentor advises she join a local organization designed to meet young people’s needs.

Grammatically it implies the wrong subject – Kim’s mentor is not looking for direction. (Or, if she is, it’s irrelevant and not what the line means to say.) Context makes the risk of ambiguity negligible, but the line may incur a brief miscue or distraction in readers as they rearrange the elements for sense.

Among the ways the line might be edited to avoid the misplaced modifier is to employ the much-maligned passive voice: Looking for direction, she is advised by her mentor to join a local organization . . . .

Dangling modifiers come in a range of types, some more conspicuous or problematic than others. In their defence, you can cite Shakespeare and Jane Austen – but even harmless danglers can interfere with a smooth reading experience, so they’re worth being on guard for. My earlier conclusion holds:

When the meaning is plain and no genuine ambiguity arises, you might get away with dangling a modifier. But it’s best to be aware of the potential pitfalls, and to recast the sentence if you judge it necessary.

*

* There’s a split infinitive for you, as a treat. I’m in group 4 for these.

Updates:

Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily and The Browser for sharing this grammar nerdout with their readers.

A dangling modifier that’s notable for occurring in a classic, canonical work, H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds:

Going on towards Brompton, the streets were quiet again.

And, likewise, in Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin:

One night, drunk, with several other people on the way back from an out-of-town party, the car I was driving smashed up.

One that Elmore Leonard, in Split Images, might just get away with through metonymy:

Leading Annie through the front hall to the study, his sneakers squeaked on the marble floor.

And one that’s queried expressly, in response to a reader’s letter, by Éanna Ní Lamhna in her ‘Eye on Nature’ column in the Irish Times, 21 June 2025:

On April 9th, which was a very warm day, I watched this moth emerge from a cocoon while climbing over rocks on the beach at Ard Forest, Creeslough, Co Donegal. Can you identify it? – Michael Fletcher, Donegal

I presume it was you rather than this ruby tiger moth climbing over the rocks on the beach. […]

‘Revolution in Grammar’ by W. Nelson Francis (1954) is the final essay in a book I read recently, Introductory Language Essays (1965), edited by Dudley Bailey; it includes a discussion of ‘that famous bugaboo, the dangling participle’:

Consider a specific instance of it, which once appeared on a college freshman’s theme, to the mingled delight and despair of the instructor:

Having eaten our lunch, the steamboat departed.

What is the trouble with this sentence? Clearly there must be something wrong with it, because it makes people laugh, although it was not the intent of the writer to make them laugh….the trouble with our dangling participle is that the form, instead of leading to the meaning, is in conflict with it. Into the position which, in this pattern, is reserved for the word naming the eater of the lunch, the writer has inserted the word “steamboat.” The resulting tug-of-war between form and meaning is only momentary; meaning quickly wins out, simply because our common sense tells us that steamboats don’t eat lunches. But if the pull of the lexical meaning is not given a good deal of help from common sense, the form will conquer the meaning, or the two will remain in ambiguous equilibrium—as, for instance, in “Having eaten our lunch, the passengers boarded the steamboat.”

#ambiguity #danglingModifiers #descriptivism #editing #EnglishUsage #grammar #language #misplacedModifiers #pragmatics #prescriptivism #reading #syntax #usage #writing #writingStyle

On the blog, a review of the linguistics book 'New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research' https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2025/04/24/book-review-new-horizons-in-prescriptivism-research-2024/

#books #BookReview #linguistics #sociolinguistics #research #language #prescriptivism #EnglishUsage