mrschili
May 11, 2007 at 7:00 am
The answer to your question is that, like so many other grammar “rules,” the serial comma convention has been opened up to personal preference. It is completely correct to put the comma before the final ‘and’ in a series, and it is completely correct to leave it out except, as you noted, if the final item contains an ‘and,’ for example;
My youngest daughter only eats chicken nuggets, Granny Smith apples, graham crackers, and macaroni and cheese.
My opinion (and it is ONLY my opinion, not hard-and-fast rule) is that the comma goes before the final ‘and’ in a series, and that’s what I teach, but I don’t mark students’ papers wrong if they leave it out. I’m not aware that it’s always that way in composition, but it’s always been that way in MY classroom. I think it’s funny that there’s a sort of blood feud between AP and composition on this. Funny how worked up we all get about grammar conventions.
Finally, I don’t know if your typeset answer for the omission of the comma is correct, but it certainly SOUNDS plausable. I kind of like it, actually….
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37 Comments.
Jangari
May 10, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Well, many in Chomskyland – the magical land where reality takes a holiday – dismiss Everett’s work entirely. The story is long and complicated.
But I don’t think linguistic relativity is all that strong, Whorf’s take on it was too strong, but linguists that accept relativity don’t go as far as he does anymore. The way Pinker characterises relativity is unfortunate, there’s a hell of a lot of middle ground on the issue, yet he remains adamant that it means that ‘culture is entirely determined by language’ which is clearly too strong, and false. A more sophisticated way to talk about it is ‘language and culture, while largely independent, influence each other somewhat’.
As for language affecting cognition, well, I don’t think that’s so unreasonable. There’s a language in PNG, I think it’s Oksapmin, also called Oksap, that has grammatical evidentiality – everything you say must obligatorily include a marker that denotes how you know this. I forget how many markers there are, less than 15, I think. They go on the end of a verb in a sentence like There’s a pig in the bush and they mark things like direct perception I saw it , indirect perception I heard but did not see it , indirect evidence I saw its footprints and deduce it is there somewhere , second-hand knowledge somebody saw it and told me and so on. Apologies to RL if I completely misrepresented your research! That was all off the top of my head from a talk at a conference last year.
The contention is this: when an Oksapmin speaker says that something is the case, they have to attend to the reason they have for knowing it to be the case, and this is due to the constraints on the grammar. Then, take it a step further: when an Oksapmin speaker speaks a different language, one without grammatical evidentiality, do they still attend to those reasons? What about when they think something, do they think about how they know something?
If the answer is yes, then there’s a strong case to conclude that the grammatical constraints of Oksapmin, namely, evidentiality, affect the cognitive processes of the speaker.
Mrs Chili, …and you do know, don’t you, that you’re a geek? Maybe even a bigger one than I?
I’m slowly but surely arriving at that conclusion. Thanks for hastening the process. Oh, and I dig that you use the word dig .
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