The Grammar Instinct
ALAN D. MANNING · 2015
In 1990, Gilsdorf and Leonard (G&L) proposed that recent changes in usage acceptability might be due to the increased influence of email informalities and the globalized use of English among non-native speakers. Most of the bothersome items in the study involved sentence structure or punctuation problems that directly impact perceived sentence structure. Setting aside the problem of ongoing language change and its causes, this chapter focuses on the problem of predicting what will remain unchanged in language-usage rules and propose an explanation for why certain rules will remain unchanged. This problem is critically important for anyone who is mentoring the writing of younger people, people whose primary audience will not follow our rules, but rather the rules of the next generation of readers. It seems unclear why we would ever disagree with other writers about "usage errors" at all, if there were a universal grammar instinct.