Smarty Pants ([info]smartypantsnyc) wrote in [info]linguistics,
@ 2008-05-03 19:35:00
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Hey there,

One of my biggest pet peeves is "on accident." Don't ask me why, but it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. I've never read of any specific rules, though. Is there a rule system for correctly assigning prepositions to nouns, that is, when it's not spacial? If so, please share?

Ryan


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[info]mintyfreshsocks
2008-05-04 12:19 am UTC (link)
"On accident" is actually perfectly grammatical for me. . . .

What you're actually asking about is idioms. "By accident" is a more subtle case, but if you think about it, it does defy compositionality. "By" generally signifies an agent or a location. "The book was written by Billy" or "the castle by the sea." It doesn't signify a manner of doing things. So, "by accident" is really just an idiomatic adverb.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 12:27 am UTC (link)
The "accident" is the agent of the action.

<3
R

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[info]mintyfreshsocks
2008-05-04 01:21 am UTC (link)
"I did it by accident."

I is the agent - a theta role assigned by the verb.

Here's another quick wiki link on what an agent is.

"By accident" is an adverb which describes the manner in which an action was done.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 01:46 am UTC (link)
However, quoting your Wiki link: "The ball was kicked by the boy", "the ball" is the grammatical subject, but "the boy" is still the agent.

Thus, "The ball was kicked by accident" makes "accident" the agent.

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[info]thelittlesthomo
2008-05-04 02:55 am UTC (link)
"The boy kicked the ball by accident."
"The ball was kicked by the boy by accident."
There's no semantic agency explanation. Prepositions and theta-roles don't match up perfectly. That's why different prepositions can be grammatical in different dialects, because they're somewhat arbitrary.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 12:31 pm UTC (link)
But...I don't like that.

LOL

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[info]serapio
2008-05-04 12:25 am UTC (link)
If you're asking about by/on specifically, it depends on how old you are, where you grew up, and for some speakers, something about agency.
http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/01_4/barratt16.htm
http://www4.uwm.edu//FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_98.html
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0301c&L=ads-l&P=2931

I don't know of anything that systematically relates abstract adpositions to concrete ones, although the embodiment people have theories about it.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 12:35 am UTC (link)
This is unsatisfying, though. Just because a certain age/ geographic group has a certain usage doesn't make it grammatically correct.

<3
R

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[info]candrodor
2008-05-04 12:58 am UTC (link)
It is for them though. :)

Think to yourself, what actually makes the things people say "grammatically correct"? What do you mean by that? As for whether it's grammatically correct for *you* or not, or whether it grates or not, that's another matter.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 01:07 am UTC (link)
It's changeable and evolving of course, but not subjective. There are rules.

Just because people on the interwebs say "I can has cheeseburger" over and over again, and I understand what that means doesn't make it grammatically correct English.

<3
R

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[info]candrodor
2008-05-04 01:12 am UTC (link)
It's not trying to be though. It's a joke based on the fact that it isn't standard English. It's a completely different register to say, writing a formal essay, or even just following a normal conversation. It's hardly fair to compare that to something like "on purpose", which many people would say perfectly naturally without thinking anything of it.

How are these rules set, out of interest, to your way of thinking?

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-07-02 01:10 am UTC (link)
They're set by a standardization of usage. When Chomsky determined all his rules of phonology, it was after the fact, based on existing generalized American English conditions. But they still form a system where unknown, fake words can be judged to obey English phonological rules ("plactation") or not ("nbroktlmumch"). In the same way, rules about grammar could be determined, also.

And yes, I know this thread is like four months old, but I've been really, really busy!

R

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[info]tahnan
2008-05-04 06:15 am UTC (link)
I fear you're looking in the wrong place for the rules. While not "subjective", things do vary from dialect to dialect. New Yorkers stand "on line", the rest of the country stands "in line"; there's nothing subjective for either group, but neither is there some Rule of Universal Grammar that says that one or the other is objectively right. (There can't be. If one of them were wrong according to the language faculty of the human brain, why would people say it? People would reject it the way they reject "What did who bring to the potluck?".)

But prepositions, as has been noted throughout these comments, are simply idiomatic. There's not going to be any objective rule of grammar (as linguists understand it) that could explain why one preposition is Right and another Wrong. The grammar, to anthropomorphize it for a moment, doesn't care whether speakers say "on accident" or "by accident" any more than it cares whether they say "on purpose" or "à dessein". Whatever word speakers agree to put there--again, probably within limits, so "above" or "near" might not be allowed"--will be within the realm of the grammar.

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[info]reediewes
2008-05-06 12:10 am UTC (link)
Descriptivism vs prescriptivism.

Be careful when you throw around words like "correct".

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-07-02 01:16 am UTC (link)
Just because English grammar didn't come about by some logical, predetermined process doesn't mean that generalized usage can't determine rules of correctness in an orderly way.

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[info]reediewes
2008-07-02 04:44 am UTC (link)
Sure, but in that case you'd have to specify what context to use as a baseline for "generalized usage".

Take ain't for example. Most of the English-speaking world doesn't use it, so it's not considered part of, say, the Standard American English dialect. But Southern American English speakers use it all the time, and it's fully a part of that dialect. To say ain't is absolutely correct or incorrect in English misses that distinction.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-07-02 11:39 am UTC (link)
Yes, and I know that was just an example, but I suspect the reason that's considered to be incorrect is based on another rule, that the combination "amnt" isn't allowed in English.

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[info]reediewes
2008-07-02 05:07 pm UTC (link)
The combination "amn't" IS "ain't" (except in some dialects where it's still "amn't") and is allowed where it's used.

Back on my original point, I'll use an analogy from orthography. Which one of these forms--"colour" or "color"--is the correct spelling of the word in English? You can make a case for either in different contexts, but to say one is the rule for English and the other is a colloquial deviation would not be right.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-07-02 06:32 pm UTC (link)
"amn't" IS "ain't"
That's exactly my point.

Where in heaven's name do people say "amn't???"

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[info]reediewes
2008-07-02 06:45 pm UTC (link)
Scotland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amn’t

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-07-02 06:53 pm UTC (link)
That's not good English.

;-p

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[info]serapio
2008-05-04 01:02 am UTC (link)
Hmm. I find it unsatisfying because I want to know why the generational difference arose, but I think it's really interesting that it did happen.

And usage is what makes something grammatically correct. If by "grammatically correct" you mean what feels like the right way to say something, that's determined by the usage you have heard growing up, and in some cases what people with authority or prestige have said is what feels like the right usage.

On the scale of populations, we can make a distinction between what is grammatical in a standard dialect and what is grammatical in dialects that are limited to regions or informal activities. In that case, we can call "grammatically correct" the usage patterns of the high prestige dialect, which is usually the one with the larger literary tradition and the supported by political power. But still what is grammatically correct in that dialect is the accumulated usage of the written language, and it is still useful to distinguish what is grammatical and ungrammatical in non-standard dialects as well, according to their usage traditions. If you speak with a southern accent in New York, there are similar consequences to if you speak with a New Yorker accent in Atlanta, write in hip-hop jive on your resume, or talk marketing jargon at a family reunion.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 01:22 am UTC (link)
What I'm asking for, though, is a determination for American English as to how these prepositions can be used correctly according to their semantic function. That has nothing to do with location or dialect, especially with these kind of words.

<3
R

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[info]serapio
2008-05-04 05:39 am UTC (link)
I don't understand why you expect the semantics or syntax of prepositions to be less related to dialect than other word categories. Semantics is part of what changes in languages, and that is one of the things that distinguishes one dialect from another. But the problem with looking for a semantic explanation for the syntax of prepositions is, as others here have said, that the syntax of prepositions is fairly arbitrary, or alternately, the semantics of prepositions is fairly defuse and bleached. If you look up any preposition in a dictionary, you'll get a dozen or more definitions because there are so many usages that don't have much semantic commonality.

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[info]athamese
2008-05-04 03:41 pm UTC (link)
This is what has been so frustrating for me in teaching ESL. I'm a native speaker of a variety of English from south-east Michigan. It wasn't until I was going a graduate certificate in TESOL that I realized just how many non-standard characteristics pepper my speech. I always thought that "we Midwesterners" had very standard speech. I now understand that my speech is much less "Midwestern" and much more "Great Lakes."

And that's the thing with "a determination for American English" - what is American English? Where are we to find the definitive guide? Who (what one person) speaks American English? When we say there's "American English," we speech about this idealized monolith of language that really doesn't exist for any one speaker. Rather, it's the homogenization of a characteristics that are in opposition to recognized characteristics of other World Englishes.

I always use the example of rhoticity to demonstrate this. People often say that one of the characteristics of American English (again, if there can be said to be one) is its rhoticity (as opposed to certain dialects of British English). But this statement ignores the variation present (and if you think about: it *has* to be present... there are >300,000,000 people in this country). Certain dialects in the Southern Midlands region are arhotic, as are the famous dialects of the Boston area. Are we to say, then, that people from Boston and Savannah don't speak American English?

So this brings me back to my original point - I consider myself an American English speaker, but I say things that others would label ungrammatical (for example: Dad used to sleep in the recliner, but anymore he sleeps on the sofa). So what do I do, then, when a student of mine hears me say something like that? Maybe a more common example would be "Gas is so expensive anymore."

...to say nothing about my vowels... I'm definitely a Northern Cities Shifter.

--Kristopher

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[info]tahnan
2008-05-04 12:31 am UTC (link)
Nope, there's no system. Sometimes there's a spacial analogy: Gary Burghoff played Radar O'Reilly in MASH, the movie, and on "M*A*S*H", the TV show. But by and large, these things are pretty much arbitrary, which is why they vary from language to language. (That's especially true of which preposition follows which verb: in English, you "depend on" something, and in Russian, you "depend from" something. Again, there may be patterns, but no absolute rule.)

My wife says "on accident", and it grates on me, too, but marital bliss is more important than a linguistic pet peeve about an arbitrary preposition. (And, she pointed out, if you do things "on purpose", why not "on accident"? I have no good answer to that. I'm not even sure I can imagine a rule that would explain why accidents are near you but purposes are underneath you.)

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 12:47 am UTC (link)
Because "on" indicates "as a result of" the purpose, in other words, the agent of the action is acting as a result of the purpose, whereas "by" indicates that the agent is outside the performer of the action.

<3
R

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[info]tahnan
2008-05-04 05:55 am UTC (link)
That's a reasonable attempt at an explanation, but it falls short in a number of ways.

First: "The agent is outside the performer of the action"? What does that mean? The performer of the action is the agent. Or, put another way, we don't say "Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy by the CIA" to mean that Oswald performed the action but the CIA was the real, and external, cause.

Second, why does "on" mean "as a result of"? I'd never say "The game was cancelled on the rain" to mean "as a result of" the rain. If this is the only phrase in English that uses "on" to mean "as a result of", then it's no explanation at all; any other preposition could have had that meaning instead.

Along these lines: shouldn't we then do things "on design" rather than "by design"? After all, the agent of the action is acting as a result of the design.

The bottom line here is that, while the story sounds good, "on" and "by" simply aren't used by that kind of purely logical reasoning. Prepositions are idiomatic.

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[info]smartypantsnyc
2008-05-04 12:36 pm UTC (link)
You're right I suppose, but it's very frustrating. *grumble*

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[info]maeveenroute
2008-05-04 03:30 pm UTC (link)
Yes, but that's what you get when you ask linguists to ignore the way people actually talk in order to make rules about how they should talk. That ain't - as one might say - how we roll. ;c)

Also, yes. Prepositions are beastly. In French, at least, there's an entire book devoted to matching up verbs with the types of prepositions they take when, simply because it's just a list you have to memorize - and note that that's only for the academic register of the prestige dialect of French. Even well-educated 30-40-something native French speakers (and here I'm thinking my former professors as well as the elementary school teachers I worked with), if they live in Quebec, will use some prepositions quite differently from the way the book prescribes (and their continental counterparts speak) ... and will still be no less logical. (As for generational and register differences, forget it!)

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[info]pannea
2008-05-04 07:56 am UTC (link)
Yeah, that is why prepositions are so hard to learn when learning a foreign language. In English, you think ABOUT something, in Norwegian you think ON something, to take yet another example of how much prepositions vary. Their use is motivated, but not predictable.

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[info]maeveenroute
2008-05-04 03:39 pm UTC (link)
Even more stressful, in English you ARE sad, while in Irish sadness is UPON you ("tá sé bron ach"); in English, you OWE me something, while in Irish, something IS WITH me ON you ("tá cíos ... agam ort").

Prepositions, easy? Predictable? Not so much. ;c)

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[info]hkitsune
2008-05-04 03:15 am UTC (link)
It has absolutely nothing to do with role assignment; there is no fast-and-true system; we can be "on time", we can talk "on a subject", etc., and talking "about" something has nothing to do with this idealistic embodiment of the subject around which we're dancing and chanting or anything. There's really no rhyme or reason to language change, let alone syntactic change.

Also, in this specific case, on is functioning as a class changer--it's taking "accident" an NP, and making it (while it might be structurally a PP) into an AdvP. It's more important the class of objects you can substitute for a given thing than what its components are, as not everything in life is black-and-white and compositional.

Edited at 2008-05-04 03:17 am UTC

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[info]edcalamia
2008-05-05 04:30 am UTC (link)
It has to do with age. 'on accident' has an infantile ring to it. It is most likely formed by analogy to 'on purpose.'

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[info]tahnan
2008-05-05 05:12 am UTC (link)
It has nothing to do with age, at least not in an "infantile" sense. (My aforementioned wife, who uses "on accident", speaks clear adult English; there's nothing "infantile" about her or her speech.) It's just a dialect difference.

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[info]withanf
2008-05-05 06:05 pm UTC (link)
It's easy to make assertions about linguistic phenomena, especially when they involve change and variation, but for the assertions to be substantive, some kind of careful investigation needs to be done, like the ones posted above.

Your social evaluation of it as infantile is a potentially interesting object of inquiry, though. Not to get too meta, but it could be indicative of change in your area, or maybe class differentiation.

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