User talk:Drew.ward

Tense
Awesome, sounds great in general. I would like to see more source references. If I have a chance I'll dig some up and intersperse. Penumbra 2k (talk) 04:18, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Modals
Hey Drew, I've answered you on my talk page. Trigaranus (talk) 13:10, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Vote of confidence
Hi Drew, see "auxiliary verb" and "Talk:Auxiliary verb" for your vindication. I just stopped by here to encourage you to hang in there with helping out Wikipedia on language topics, despite the frustrations (which, sadly, even I added to yesterday). I dream of doing the translational work (as the medical science people call it) that will bring the basic science being generated by linguistics and turn it into broadly applied science to be mixed into language pedagogy, which is currently still just a folk art (like shaman healing in the medical analogy). Which will take a lot of explication and side-by-side, point-by-point comparison—e.g., "people often believe X, but it's actually Y"—a huge task that is like moving a mountain one stone at a time. The fact that I'm not a trained linguist will complicate that goal, of course. No rush; I'm just laying out the dream of where I'd like to see WP's coverage of language go over the next decade or two, if we get the chance. Thanks for all you do. — ¾-10 12:32, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Infinitive with auxiliary verb?
Hey, in the edit summary of your recent edit of the article Infinitive, you said that the verb form after certain auxiliaries isn't an infinitive, as for example "be" in "will be". But the article itself states that this verb is an infinitive, in the section Infinitive, so I reverted your edit, since the article should remain consistent with itself. Why do you say that the verbs aren't infinitives? Must infinitives always have the particle "to" before them? And if they aren't infinitives, what are they? — Eru·tuon 13:55, 25 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Erutuon,


 * Yeah that article is wrong in a lot of ways as are the vast majority of grammar and linguistics articles on wp. This seems to be one academic field where the beauty of wikipedia (the fact that anyone can contribute and edit) is the downfall of it as well.  Language is quite simple if you know what you're looking at.  Unfortunately most people have no clue what they are actually looking at!  The article itself is wrong in a lot of ways because many of the assumptions on which it is based are incorrect.  I haven't even thought about editing the actual article as a whole to any major extent because it would take a full rewrite and even then, it's more likely that it would just be reverted because while incorrect, a lot of the ideas proposed in the article are commonly thought to be correct and on wikipedia (especially with linguistics), consensus wins out over accuracy every time, so it tends not to be worth the effort.  However, when there is something simple that is wrong (like the line I deleted in this one), I tend to go ahead and try to at least clean up the article to keep it from doing as much damage (damage to others who tend to believe everything on sites like WP as fact).


 * Much of that article conflates two different things -- infinitives and the infinitive form. Infinitives are simply a verb taken out of context and separated out syntactically from the other verbal components of the utterance in which it appears.  If you happened to read or watch Angels and Demons, they had a container that was able to hold antimatter suspended within it so that that antimatter could be kept separate from all regular matter, but where they could still move it around, observe it, talk about it, discuss it, etc.  In language, an infinitive is like that container because it keeps the verb isolated and separate from all other "verby" things, yet still allows it to be discussed, moved, talked about, etc.


 * Infinitives in English can be of three forms: to+verb, verb, and verb+ing. The most common of these is to+verb.  Verb+ing is also fairly common, but most people mistakenly analyze such infinitives as being gerunds.  Because to+verb is the common form used for infinitives, this is generically called the 'infinitive form'.  Of course, this is not THE infinitive form because infinitives can just as easily be in two other forms.  But still, in English, to+verb is considered the 'infinitive form' of a verb.  Keep in mind though, infinitive form simply describes a structure (to+verb).  It does not specify something as being functionally an infinitive (a verb taken out of context).  Unfortunately, most people, including the vast majority of grammarians and linguists, fail to make this separation, and assume that any time they see to+verb, that it is an infinitive.


 * The statement that infinitives occur after auxiliaries is inherently flawed because an infinitive can't be part of the actual verb of an utterance. By 'verb' here I mean 'whole verb', and I actually like the term 'verject', which is basically everything that conveys the verbal information of an utterance. Within a verject, you always have at least one auxiliary, and at least one vector (idea verb).  Different auxiliaries require their subordinate (the verb immediately following them)to take on a certain form.  Modal auxiliaries always subordinate to one of two forms -- the infinitive form (to+verb) and the finite form (verb -- the dictionary form).  Which form is required varies by the structural class to which that individual auxiliary belongs.


 * Will, would, should, shall, can, must, etc all subordinate to the finite form (will be, will eat, will address).


 * have (modal), ought, want, like, etc all subordinate to the infinitive form (have to leave, ought to go, want to eat, like to play).


 * need, dare, and some others can do both (I need to go, you need not know, dare to dream, dare not ask).


 * The thing to remember though is that those are only forms, they're not infinitives because the verbs are all part of the verject (verbal component of the utterance), they just LOOK like infinitives.


 * SO that's why I removed that line. Make sense? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Drew.ward (talk • contribs) 06:01, 26 May 2011


 * Ohh, I see where you're coming from. You have a different definition of infinitive from mine. As I learned it, an infinitive is a form not specifying person or number, which does not restrict it from being part of the verbal component of a sentence. I have only encountered this definition in Latin and Ancient Greek and old Germanic grammars, and it's the one given in SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. Which references use your definition? — Eru·tuon 21:53, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Dative/Accusative
Would you mind telling where you've run across this term to describe the English case system?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:08, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I won't be at the computer for any decent amount of time till later tonight but will google again and post then. I haven't specifically messed with google scholar on this but just a regular google search brings up many hits and also includes variations like dative-accusative, accusative-dative, accusative/dative as well (I put dative before accusative for this article because there are already several uses of "accusative/dative" in articles here on WP in which they are just referring to the two cases collectively and I did not want to risk someone confusing that string of words with this.  Also, the dative case generally precedes the accusative word order wise so it seems logical.  Keep in mind though that neither I nor anything I've seen argues for a dative/accusative case but rather for there being a single form of pronouns that is common to both dative and accusative in English.  Prior to this encounter with Kwami I have never heard of case being restricted to only an expression of morphology.  In English it's primarily established by word order with the pronouns (and nouns as well in the genitive) having the only remainder of morphological markings.  As to English having only two cases as Kwami purports, or three cases as the subjective/objective/possessive guys purport, I can't find a consensus supporting either.  The S/O/P system seems restricted to mostly US-based K-12 English materials and some ESL publishers and seems to have started falling out of use around the same time that sentence=subject+predicate did.  The remaining uses of objective (in lieu of dative and accusative) seem to be a holdover of that term from S/O/P but with the rest updated.  The problem with all of these is of course that they attempt to treat English uniquely and separately from other languages and the simplest response to that is that it's not linguistically kosher.  I have found articles claiming that the dative and accusative have merged (with some calling the merged thing dative, some accusative, and others objective).  I can find very little and nothing of good quality that supports the idea of English having an oblique case.  What I can find is people mixing up oblique constructions and usage such as "oblique cases (with those cases then usually listed as dative and accusative)" with the idea of a separate oblique case.  It seems that the proposal of oblique case is that it occurs in a group of languages in which there would only be an unmarked nominative case and then some secondary single marked case covering everything else.  The descriptions out there seem to preclude this 'oblique' case from occurring in conjunction with anything but nominative (including genitive which means it can't occur in English).  Regarding case in general, everything I have ever encountered and the references I find online list it as a grammatical category along with tense, aspect, mood, etc.  Grammatical categories by definition are attributes expressed via grammar (syntax).  Sometimes these expressions are carried at the lexical level, but either way, without being in some grammatical construction, even such lexical expression can have no meaning.  Case in English meets this accepted description with word order establishing the bulk of case marking and these different pronoun forms backing that up.  I just don't understand why it's ok for Kwami to constantly take it upon himself to rewrite the rules of linguistics to mesh with whatever his interest at that time is and then that it be on the rest of WP to argue that his changes are not the norm.  He's done this with mood, his TAM article, tense, aspect, all sorts of things and every time not only changed one article but then systematically gone through all related articles to make them match.  With tense he argued something similar pushing the idea that tense is somehow only expressed via marked lexemes and with case again he seems incapable of separating the idea of form from function.  These pronouns are just the same form.  By themselves, they're just words.  Case is either dative or accusative depending on where those pronouns are used in the sentence.  If you go for his analysis then the only existence of case at all in English would be those pronouns because nouns are unmarked.Drew.ward (talk) 00:14, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The question is one of linguistic theory - its not about being right or wron it is about theoretical preferences, and I think this needs to come clear in the treatment of the topic. One drawback of your definition is that all languages will have case because it makes it impossible to distinguish case from syntactic roles. That is what Kwami is reacting against, he argues that case should only be used to describe those languages where syntactic roles are marked morphologically. This argument is pretty common in functional/typological literature and goes back to Jespersen and Sweets descriptions of English Grammar. You on the other hand also have a point by defining "dative" and "accusative" as functions - but in the typological literature these functions tend to be labled as "indirect object" (or oblique object) and "direct object" respectively. In this approach one would say that English uses the same morphological case for both syntactic roles. I think that calling it accusative/dative is to commit the age old error of using the categories of Latin as the basic categories for describing other languages. Latin distinguishes has distinct cases with which to mark IO and O, whereas English mark both IO and O the same - it is only from the latinate standpoint that this would mean that English has a dative-accusative case. This was definitely Jespersens argument - one should name the categories of any language in accordance with their specific functions in that language - not through hoe they map on to cases in another language. Definitely I thini it is a common and valid analysis of English and Danish to sy that thereis only case in the pronouns (and in Danish there are vestiges of Dative in some nouns). I don't think Kwami is more at fault here than you are - you both seem to argue that you have the right interpretation and the other is wrong. In fact they are different perspectives that are both reasonable if argued as such - right now kwamis argument is stronger because he in fact backs it with some sources. You shoud both try better to situate our arguments in relation to theory and in relation to the literature and then we may reach a way to describe both interpretations and achieve true NPOV.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 02:09, 23 March 2012 (UTC)

Putting my words in your mouth
Hello, Drew.ward. At Talk:Do-support you asked, '   "I note Drew.ward's suggestions above that experts, not the usage of English speakers and writers, determine what is Standard English"  ummm...where exactly did I say that??Drew.ward (talk) 16:28, 19 June 2012 (UTC)'

That is my interpretation of this statement: 'Just because an error is common does not make it grammatical. I can go out into the street and here "She be hatin on him" but to include it in a reference to English grammar would be wrong because no matter how many people say it, it's grammatically incorrect. Drew.ward (talk) 13:41, 12 October 2011 (UTC)'

It is unfair of me to put words in your mouth. But if your declaration, 'it's grammatically incorrect' does not come from common usage, then I assume it comes from expert knowledge. Cnilep (talk) 01:50, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Grammar and Semantics of Tense

 * 1) . Saussure in "Cours de linguistique générale" establishes that grammar is a system of syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures, that can be described in relation to each other independently of their meanings.
 * 2) . This line of thinking is followed by the Bloomfieldians and by Chomsky. Chomsky's famous example of Colorless green ideas sleep furiously from Syntactic Structures (p. 15) exactly demonstrates the distinction between syntax (which determines what is grammatical) and semanitics (which determines what is meaningful). Following Chomsky's logics "The fish had swum" is syntactically equivalent to the "the man had spoken", or "my dog had died" and the addition of a temporal adverb has nothing to do with grammaticality. Most functional theories of grammar accept the distinction between meaning and grammar, although some such as lexical functional grammar do not - but in my understanding there is no reason to think that even LFG people would consider "tomorrow" to be an expression of tense.
 * 3) . As for what it means for tyense to be grammatical and whether adverbs express tense Comrie 1985 discusses this on pages 10 - 12. Arguing very cogently that they do not, because the only adverb in English that corresponds exactly in meaning to a tense is "now", there is no adverb that has the exact meaning of the past or future tense. "formerly" denotes pastness, but also habituality. "Tomorrow" denotes an absolute time reference to the day after the day on which the utterance is said, which is not a gramatical category in English (although apparently "yesterday"-tense exists in Czech).
 * 4) . As for English Tense: Otto Jespersen in his grammar of English makes it a point to establish that Time and Tense are two different things. He explicitly gives the example that "I am here tomorrow" is a statement in the present tense which refers to a future time. I don't know of any grammarians that have contradicted Jespersen on this point. Peter Harder who wrote "Functional Semantics: A Theory of Meaning, Structure, and Tense in English" certainly does not - although he does disagree with Jespersen that English has no future tense. Harder considers the "will"-construction to be a future tense, albeit one that also has a modal component - i.e. not "pure tense". I personally agree with him here, but this is not the most common analysis, rather the analysis of English as having only two tenses is predominant, as Harder states on page 368. The same point (the dominance of the two tense analysis) is maintained by Laura Michaelis (2008) in the chapter Tense in English, in The Handbook of English Linguistics. Arguing against the notion of "will" as a future tense she writes that: "Additional evidence that an aspectual construction may function as a tense without losing its aspectual properties is provided by the so-called future tense of English, a periphrastic construction whose head is the modal verb will. A number of scholars, including Binnick (1991: 251–2) and Hornstein (1991: 19–20), have argued that the modal future of English does not have future reference but rather present-time reference, as indicated by patterns of adverbial co-occurrence. This will lead us to conclude that modal-future sentences are in fact present-tense stative predications. As we will see in section 4, this analysis of the English modal future, combined with the analysis of the present tense developed in section 3, has a significant implication for our description of the tense system of English: this system, rather than being based upon a past–nonpast division, as many scholars (e.g., Comrie 1985; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997) have assumed, is in fact based upon the opposition between past and present."(p. )·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 20:19, 13 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I give you this, and you give me a google search. That is offensive. I am ignoring you from now on, but I will revert any unsourced edits you make on sight.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:58, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Why on earth are you assuming intended offense? Maunus, you stated that "It is an absolute an non-negotiable requirement for any change to take place that you present sources in support of the notion that there is a pre-theoretical sense of semantic "tense", and that this view is shared by a majority of scholars. The wikipedia article must reflect the general literature on this topic."  My reply is neither offensive or anything else, but does clearly show (click on any of the links) that the world views tense in a myriad of ways and not only in the narrow definitions that you've argued for on here.  I took the time to write what I feel is a VERY fair option through which all of the grievances that everyone (including you) have raised about the treatment of tense on wikipedia.  It neither promotes my views nor limits discussion to my views, nor does it preclude or demote your views.  It instead provides a means by which all views can be presented and it does so with the justification that no single view (mine, yours, a grammar guide's, or anyone else') can represent the wide range of meanings and uses attributed this concept.  The fact that just typing in "english tense" into google brings up over 31 million hits, and that on that first page they not only appear to be different from each other but that not a single one is wholly in line with any of the versions (including yours and including mine) of what tense has been argued to be here on wikipedia should be evidence enough that we can't just choose one treatment of tense.  That was the intention and if you are offended by that I have no clue how to un-offend you.Drew.ward (talk) 19:51, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Do-support and the three-revert rule
Hello Drew.ward. You and Tjo3ya appear to be engaged in an edit war on the article Do-support. I know that you both have strong ideas about this article, but there is a bright-line rule called the "three revert rule" or 3RR which says that if you revert an article three or more times within twenty-four hours you will be temporarily blocked from editing. In order to deal with an editor who repeatedly reverts an article without discussion, you should report the behavior to one of the Noticeboards such as Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents.

I am leaving a similar message on Tjo3ya's user talk page. Cnilep (talk) 06:37, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Drew, I am now going to report your behavior to the Wikipedia noticeboards. I am going to link my message to the a couple of the talk pages that demonstrate how you operate. Apparently, I am required to notify you that this is being done. --Tjo3ya (talk) 07:41, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

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Re: subcategories of the hortative subjunctive
Dear Mr. Ward,

I noticed that you've added a number of subcategories to the hortative page (e.g. suprahortative, infrahortative, etc.). Can you point me to a source for those subcategories? I've been unable to find them online.

Best, --2604:5500:F:1DFC:5577:EAB7:13AD:645D (talk) 05:40, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

language education programs
Hi Drew.ward -- I'm a long-time editor, academic copyright attorney / librarian, and now parent of a kid in elementary school, and I am consequently educating myself about various literacy methods. Looking at the various items in List of phonics programs, I've been disturbed to see that many of them appear to be basically ad copy from commercial companies marketing these services. I have no confidence that the list itself adequately covers the most significant phonics programs. I also have virtually no knowledge of the programs to get a foothold on the editing. I went to a WikiProject page on education and saw you listed as a project participant with interests in these areas; hence this contact!

So I could keep poking along cleaning up these articles and learning about the topic, but it occurred to me -- I'm going to run a wikipedia edit-a-thon on our campus (UMass Amherst) later this month as part of Open Access Week, so I could do some outreach to our Ed grad students & recruit some to work on these articles. Would you be able to advise about good topics, or help generate such a list?

--Lquilter (talk) 11:53, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

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