well i read the replied-to post as being in the past tense so the question would have to be "how many of you were there?" not "how many of you are there?". since you aren't attending and since you attended, i would think the first question would be the correct grammatical form.

<Is this trait an inevitable result of studying linguistics, or is it perhaps something that actually causes people to want to study linguistics in the first place? >

Interesting question.

Obviously, linguists are likely to be people who started as natural observers of language, and it's certainly something you could hit on independently. So for instance, maybe you notice that almost everyone you hear speaking English around you uses turns of phrase which are supposed to be "ungrammatical" according to your English class. Or maybe you just notice the contradiction involved when some people think the dictionary is the ultimate authority on what is "real" English, yet protest when the dictionary accepts some word they don't approve of.

It's entirely likely, though, that someone could enter linguistics largely a perscriptivist, with their pull coming from elsewhere (e.g. a general interest in languages or language universals, or artificial intelligence). People in the field of linguistics hold on to some perscriptivism, to the degree that papers have to be written in a standard academic dialect. However, if you wanted to remain a hardcore perscriptivist, you'd be out of linguistics pretty quickly, or your brain would explode.

The split infinitive example given is an interesting case in which the REAL grammar and the PRESCRIPTIVIST grammar are in actual conflict. Following one violates the other.

We know when real grammar, that is to say descriptive grammar, is violated, because it simply =sounds wrong= to a native speaker.

That is how linguists do their science -- by mapping what =sounds right= and what =sounds wrong= to a native speaker, aka Native Speaker Intuition, and then attempt to figure out the system that is behind that intuition in the speaker's head.

"I'd include the history of the split infinitive rule - I recall from teaching intro that it goes back to 1769, based of course on Latin, where the infinitive is a single word that can't be split. But I'm really supposed to be working! "

Yes, Karin, I believe it was Robert Lowth, Bishop of London and Prescriptivist Grammarian, who gave us the don't split infinitives rule. Irony of ironies, in Latin the infinitive form of the verb is a single word, and cannot be split, but in English it is a prepositional phrase to + verb. In Latin, it is common to 'split' prepositional phrases: e.g., de rerum natura 'concerning the nature of things'.
So, this rule is wrong even by Latin standards ...

"I think even people who like to correct or complain about other people's grammar would admit that "rules of grammar" arise from the way people use the language. However, I would say that there are "rules" that are so widely enough followed that it is possible to say that a particular sentence is wrong - it's wrong according to the generally agreed grammar (and spelling) of the day. "

That is exactly right.

By linguistic standards, the following sentence would be incorrect grammar:

"I think for people even who to liking correct and complain others people grammar would to admit rules grammar arised of the way people use of the language."

Linguistics studies DESCRIPTIVE grammar and makes a clear distinction between descriptive and prescriptive grammar.

How do you know the difference?

No one has to tell you how to use the descriptive grammar of your native language.

The rules of English grammar are extremely complex. Since the 1950s, millions of personhours have been spent in an unsuccessful effort to get computers to simulate natural language. Yet, a computer could still not generate the preceding sentence or use English anywhere near as well as a three-year-old child.

To get a linguistics degree, you have to get through a course in Chomskyan syntactic theory and the incredibly complex process involved in transformations like "He went to the store" to "Won't he go to the store?" and so on. It's a hard course and a lot of students end up taking it twice. Yet, if you are a native English speaker, no one ever taught you the complicated rules of, say, English question formation. If you are a native English speaker, never has anyone ever told you, "Don't say 'Will not he go to the store?'" (Even though we say "Won't he go the store?" and "won't" is supposed to be a contraction of "will not.") No one has probably ever told you, "Don't say 'Look up it'" although we say "Look up the number" and "Look at it." The rules you are using in every single sentence you make are incredibly complex. You don't have any idea what an incredible thing you are doing when you form a sentence. Linguistics is about studying that. Linguistics basically has so much respect for the amazing feat of using language that, well, we think all grammars are equally amazing.

I took a course in African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE. Almost every non-linguist (non-black or black) seems to react as though that is a joke, or maybe PC, but AAVE is the subject of serious linguistic study, and in fact is much more complex in verb aspects than standard English, using auxiliaries like "been" and "done been." And in linguistics, the fact that this is socially considered "bad" English is studied separately -- in sociolinguistics class. Sociolinguistics is where we study the intersection of language and social class, and the social function of prestige dialects.

I'm not "complaining about people who complain." I think that there is not a place for prescriptivism. Some prescriptive rules that do serve an actual purpose of clearer communication. Rules against dangling participles, for example. And prescriptivist rules against misusing certain words. Those are often useful, especially when a word is threatened with loss of meaning and there is no replacement word. For example, "disinterested," which is losing its meaning of "not having a vested interest" to be a redundant synonym of "uninterested." Disinterested is not a synonym of unbiased, because you can be disinterested (have no vested interest) but still be biased, maybe because a party in a dispute reminds you of someone. The distinction between disinterested and unbiased is an important distinction, and the semantic loss of "disinterested" is a loss to the language. There are countless examples like this -- "penultimate" being used to mean "ultimate," "literally" being used to mean "figuratively" (its opposite!) Prescriptivist rules about correct word usage can be important. And there are other prescriptivist rules with a positive benefit.

But that's how I look at prescriptivist rules -- do we need this rule for the sake of communication? That is why I responded to the original point by saying, "We do without case marking on nouns (and on the pronouns you and it) so we don't need case marking on pronouns." Making mistakes in pronoun case practically never causes misunderstood communication. So, that prescriptivist rule seems to serve no purpose.

I'm not "complaining about people who complain," because I too complain about some misuses of language. I just select my own pet peeves in a pragmatic way.

> the language. However, I would say that there are "rules" that are so widely enough followed that it is possible to say that a particular sentence is wrong - i

I was going to say:

"rules widely enough followed..."

and then thought it would be better as

"rules so widely followed..."

but I forgot to delete the "enough".

But I guess everyone knew what I meant.

I probably went too far in my demonstration of descriptively incorrect grammar. I was trying to respond to:

"Truely incorrect grammar is something so idiosyncratic, or rare, that it impedes understanding. "

You can to have truly incorrect grammar and it still can to be understood.

Grammar is a system inside native speakers' heads. They may not know how it works themselves, but every speaker of every language in the world can intuitively recognize a sentence that is grammatically wrong.

Grammatically wrong, that is, in the descriptive sense.

Prescriptive rules happen only along the borderlines of real grammar, the area where things get fuzzy and dialects and idiolects differ. But REAL grammar is NEVER violated by native speakers (except to make a point, as I did above with "can to have," or to imitate a foreigner's incompetence, something like that).

Most of the morphosyntactic grammar of English lies in its word order, and English syntax is incredibly complex. You can probably often quickly spot a non-native English speakers post by mistakes in word order that a native speaker would never make.

That is what linguists study about grammar: WHY would a native speaker never put words in that order?

Why a native speaker in that order words would put never?

(BTW, I had to specify "morphosyntactic grammar" above because in linguistics, the word "grammar" encompasses the sound system of a language as well. The word used in linguistics to mean "grammar" in the sense that we are using it here is "morphosyntax.")