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Misuse of prepositions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5783 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 9 of 16 09 August 2012 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When is a native speaker a "mistake" and when not? For me, there are 3 kinds of native
speaker utterances that might be taken for a mistake, but IMO only one kind actually is a mistake. 1) Dialect. Living in the north of England (but not being from there) I really notice how important dialect is. I hear natives (even well-educated ones with masters degrees) saying things like "it were", "he were", "she were" etc*. One person I work with who says things like this has an M.A. in English literature! IMO this is not a mistake, the native is correctly using a perfectly valid English dialect that I don't happen to share. *Note for clarity: I mean in indicative sentences. 2) Cases where native speakers disagree that do not involve dialect. Recently my mother and my sister were discussing the phrases "inside out" and "outside in". To my sister "outside in" is wrong and only "inside out" is correct; to my mother both are correct, but "outside in" sounds better and is the one she always uses. To me both sound completely correct and I am happy using either. In both these cases you can only call these errors if you believe that one form of the language is somehow better than others. This is not the place for that argument, but for those, like me, who don't believe this to be so the above two kinds of "error" are not really errors. I know many of you disagree with this stance and my heart is actually with you even though my head disagrees with you (for instance I find the use of "which" as a conjunction by young people in modern UK English incredibly ugly). 3) Finally there are the errors committed by natives when they are tired, drunk or (more and more) just plain lazy. These are errors IMO. I know that I make mistakes and in these cases (and only these cases) I think advanced non-natives do have a right to correct natives. This is an area where I feel very conflicted. On the one hand I personally feel very strongly that it is elitist to tell natives how they should be using their own language, just because it doesn't conform to some standard; but if mrwarper were to correct my spelling or punctuation (sadly something not at all unlikely), I would not consider it a valid argument to say, "I'm a native, so I can spell this word how I like." Clearly my views on this are still a little inconsistent. :-( I agree with mrwarper that a native standard is not unattainable; but I think it is very rare indeed. It's not rare on this forum; but I don't think the regulars on this forum are very representative of language learners in general. In my entire life I only remember twice being fooled into thinking someone was a native. One was a Swede, the other was from Switzerland. I also met a Japanese person whose accent gave him away, but whose English was so correct that he could have fooled me in writing. For what it's worth mrwarper will remember that he did indeed fool me in writing the first time we interacted on here (which led to me making a bit of a fool of myself). Nevertheless, giving special status to natives is a decent rule of thumb which works 99% of the time IMO. @ Julie: I don't remember ever hearing the term "intralinguistic interference" before, I doubt it is well-known by anyone other than academic linguists. I wouldn't worry though, it is instantly comprehensible and rather pretty. My first thought on reading it was that I needed to remember it for future use. EDIT:
I should have said advanced non-natives or natives themselves as the above makes it sound like I think natives have special privileges over non-natives who have reached a native standard. I used to think so, but no longer do. Edited by Random review on 09 August 2012 at 7:06pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6903 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 10 of 16 09 August 2012 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I won't quote any statistics but there have been studies like that, it's nothing new. I wish I could give you some references but I really don't remember where exactly I was reading about it.
Could you elaborate a bit on that? I want to be sure we're talking about the same thing, especially while referring to some mistakes as 'random'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 11 of 16 09 August 2012 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Random review: hey dude! ;)
Don't worry to much about such 'inconsistencies', we humans are complicated: you could say that a mistake is anything that is labelled wrong without anyone arguing, and that will only make your usual smart alecks to argue every time someone else says they're wrong, just to weasel out of their slip-ups being called a mistake... Native vs non-native and mistakes? Nah. Once you have rules that tell you if something is right or wrong, it doesn't matter where you were born or grew up. The problem with languages is, we never seem to agree on how optional the rules are. Anyway, I would definitely say an utterance is a mistake if it gets you before a firing squad for espionage ;) @Julie: when (in the absence of deeper analysis, provided they're at all possible) there's no clearly prevalent source of errors, I call them 'random'. Simple as that. I don't think it would be very honest to say linguistic interference is not such a prevalent source (though this is just a feel not based on actual numbers), so when LI is possible (as it is for polyglots and foreign speakers), I simply say 'less random' because we have one clearly identified possible source of errors. But listing other possible sources for natives' mistakes? I would rather devote the same amount of time to actually studying instead ;) Edited by mrwarper on 09 August 2012 at 10:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5783 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 12 of 16 09 August 2012 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Example of a real error by a native speaker:
Is there a smiley for an embarrassed grin? @ mrwarper: I hope I didn't offend you with this:
My point was only that my spelling and punctuation are sadly not perfect. I wasn't trying to imply anything about you, but I realise on reading it through again that it's ambiguous. Edited by Random review on 09 August 2012 at 8:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 13 of 16 09 August 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Randomreview I remember all of our interactions here indeed --I don't go around calling people 'dude' at random-- and I have to agree that I'd be likely to correct you. It is a bit sad too (that I would) ;)
OK, seriously now, never mind about that bit; we all have had our not-so-bright moments and coincidentally I did exactly that to one of my CELTA co-students -- isn't it funny? She got extremely offended, even if I waited until the 'class' was over to correct her; she only understood that it was for our students and how important it was for us not to make such mistakes in front of them (won't somebody please think of the students?!) after she got to correct me and I wasn't mad at her so she would finally listen. So... thank you for taking the time to explain, and rest assured I wasn't offended at all, just a bit amused after you made me think about it again :D 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4622 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 14 of 16 09 August 2012 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Every native English speaker would talk about hearing something "on" the radio. But German people often say "in the radio" when speaking English. This is because they are substituting the appropriate pronoun from their own language.
There are some mistakes that a native never makes, but foreigners often do. Edited by beano on 09 August 2012 at 10:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 16 09 August 2012 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Must be why so many foreigners just can't say "an der Radio"...
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4844 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 16 of 16 09 August 2012 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Good observation! Using the correct prepositions is one of the trickiest aspects of language learning, because it's purely idiomatic. BTW, by "pronoun" you meant "preposition".
You either say "im Radio" or "am Radio", but never "an der Radio". "Radio" is neuter ("das Radio"), and "an" in this case requires the dative . 1 person has voted this message useful |
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