How many native speakers of English never make mistakes or never “pick an unnatural choice”?
I’m not talking about performance errors in general. I’m talking about the fact that it is extremely hard to acquire native-like competence wrt the semantics and pragmatics of the ways in which English allows one to express something about the future.
She speaks better English than most “natives”.
Your utterance of this sentence severely damages your credibility with respect to any linguistic issue. The proper way to say this is: she speaks higher-status English than most native speakers. Besides, the fact that she gets perfect scores on some test (whose content and format is unknown to me), which presumably native speakers don’t, suggests that she is far from an average individual anyway.
Also, that you’re not bringing up a single relevant study that compares long-time L2 speakers with native speakers on some interesting, intricate and subtle issue where a competence difference might be suspected leaves me with a very low expectation of the fruitfulness of this discussion, so maybe we should just leave it at that. I’m not even sure to what extent we aren’t simply talking past each other because we have different ideas about what native-like performance means.
Tell your French linguist to go into countryside and listen to the French of the uneducated native speakers. Do they make syntax errors?
They don’t, by definition; not the way you probably mean it. I wouldn’t know why the rate of performance errors should correlate in any way with education (controlling for intelligence). I also trust the man’s judgment enough to assume that he was talking about a sort of error that stuck out because a native speaker wouldn’t make it.
I’m talking about the fact that it is extremely hard to acquire native-like competence wrt the semantics and pragmatics of the ways in which English allows one to express something about the future.
I don’t think so. This looks like an empirical question—what do you mean by “extremely hard”? Any evidence?
Your utterance of this sentence severely damages your credibility with respect to any linguistic issue. The proper way to say this is: she speaks higher-status English than most native speakers.
No, I still don’t think so—for either of your claims. Leaving aside my credibility, non-black English in the United States (as opposed to the UK) has few ways to show status and they tend to be regional, anyway. She speaks better English (with some accent, to be sure) in the usual sense—she has a rich vocabulary and doesn’t make many mistakes.
she is far from an average individual anyway.
While that is true, your claims weren’t about averages. Your claims were about impossibility—for anyone. An average person isn’t successful at anything, including second languages.
I don’t think so. This looks like an empirical question—what do you mean by “extremely hard”? Any evidence?
I don’t know if anybody has ever studied this—I would be surprised if they had -, so I have only anecdotal evidence from the uncertainty I myself experience sometimes when choosing between “will”, “going to”, plain present, “will + progressive”, and present progressive, and from the testimony of other highly advanced L2 speakers I’ve talked to who feel the same way—while native speakers are usually not even aware that there is an issue here.
She speaks better English (with some accent, to be sure) in the usual sense—she has a rich vocabulary and doesn’t make many mistakes.
How exactly is “rich vocabulary” not high-status? (Also, are you sure it actually contains more non-technical lexemes and not just higher-status lexemes?) I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “mistakes”. Things that are ungrammatical in your idiolect of English?
While that is true, your claims weren’t about averages. Your claims were about impossibility—for anyone. An average person isn’t successful at anything, including second languages.
I actually made two claims. The one was that it’s not entirely clear that there aren’t any such in-principle impossibilities, though I admit that the case for them isn’t very strong. I will be very happy if you give me a reference surveying some research on this and saying that the empirical side is really settled and the linguists who still go on telling their students that it isn’t are just not up-to-date.
The second is that in any case, only the most exceptional L2 learners can in practice expect to ever achieve native-like fluency.
It seems you are talking about being self-conscious, not about language fluency.
I didn’t say it was about fluency. But I don’t think it’s about self-consciousness, either. Native speakers of a language pick the appropriate tense and aspect forms of verbs perfectly effortlessly—or how often do you hear a native speaker of English use a progressive in a case where it strikes you as inappropriate and you would say that they should really have used a plain tense here, for example?* - while for L2 speakers, it is generally pretty hard to grasp all the details of a language’s tense/aspect system.
*I’m choosing the progressive as an example because it’s easiest to describe, not because I think it’s a candidate for serious unacquirability. It’s known to be quite hard for native speakers of a language that has no aspect, but it’s certainly possible to get to a point where you don’t use the progressive wrongly essentially ever.
What possible mechanism do you have in mind?
For syntax, you would really need to be a strong Chomskian to expect any such things. For semantics, it seems to be a bit more plausible a priori: maybe as an adult, you have a hard time learning new ways of carving up the world?
Well, let’s get specific. Which test do you assert native speakers will pass and ESL people will not (except for the “most exceptional”)?
I don’t know of a pass/fail format test, but I expect reading speed and the speed of their speech to be lower in L2 speakers than in L1 speakers of comparable intelligence. I would also expect that if you measure cognitive load somehow, language processing in an L2 requires more of your capacity than processing your L1. I would also expect that the active vocabulary of L1 speakers is generally larger than that of an L2 speaker even if all the words in the L1 speaker’s active lexicon are in the L2 speaker’s passive vocabulary.
The things being measured are different. To a first
approximation, all native speakers do maximally well at
sounding like a native speaker.
Lumifer’s
friend
may indeed speak like a native speaker (though it’s rare for
people who learned as adults to do so), but she cannot be
better at it than “most ‘natives’”.
Or maybe it means that high status and low status English have different difficulties, and native speakers tend to learn the one that their parents use (finding others harder) while L2 speakers learn to speak from a description of English which is actually a description of a particular high status accent (usually either Oxford or New England I think)
The “Standard American Accent” spoken in the media and generally taught to foriegners is the confusingly named “Midwestern” Accent, which due to internal migration and a subsequent vowel shift, is now mostly spoken in California and the Pacific Northwest.
Interestingly enough, my old Japanese instructor was a native Osakan, who’s natural dialect was Kansai-ben; despite this, she conducted the class using the standard, Tokyo Dialect.
I’m not talking about performance errors in general. I’m talking about the fact that it is extremely hard to acquire native-like competence wrt the semantics and pragmatics of the ways in which English allows one to express something about the future.
Your utterance of this sentence severely damages your credibility with respect to any linguistic issue. The proper way to say this is: she speaks higher-status English than most native speakers. Besides, the fact that she gets perfect scores on some test (whose content and format is unknown to me), which presumably native speakers don’t, suggests that she is far from an average individual anyway.
Also, that you’re not bringing up a single relevant study that compares long-time L2 speakers with native speakers on some interesting, intricate and subtle issue where a competence difference might be suspected leaves me with a very low expectation of the fruitfulness of this discussion, so maybe we should just leave it at that. I’m not even sure to what extent we aren’t simply talking past each other because we have different ideas about what native-like performance means.
They don’t, by definition; not the way you probably mean it. I wouldn’t know why the rate of performance errors should correlate in any way with education (controlling for intelligence). I also trust the man’s judgment enough to assume that he was talking about a sort of error that stuck out because a native speaker wouldn’t make it.
I don’t think so. This looks like an empirical question—what do you mean by “extremely hard”? Any evidence?
No, I still don’t think so—for either of your claims. Leaving aside my credibility, non-black English in the United States (as opposed to the UK) has few ways to show status and they tend to be regional, anyway. She speaks better English (with some accent, to be sure) in the usual sense—she has a rich vocabulary and doesn’t make many mistakes.
While that is true, your claims weren’t about averages. Your claims were about impossibility—for anyone. An average person isn’t successful at anything, including second languages.
I don’t know if anybody has ever studied this—I would be surprised if they had -, so I have only anecdotal evidence from the uncertainty I myself experience sometimes when choosing between “will”, “going to”, plain present, “will + progressive”, and present progressive, and from the testimony of other highly advanced L2 speakers I’ve talked to who feel the same way—while native speakers are usually not even aware that there is an issue here.
How exactly is “rich vocabulary” not high-status? (Also, are you sure it actually contains more non-technical lexemes and not just higher-status lexemes?) I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “mistakes”. Things that are ungrammatical in your idiolect of English?
I actually made two claims. The one was that it’s not entirely clear that there aren’t any such in-principle impossibilities, though I admit that the case for them isn’t very strong. I will be very happy if you give me a reference surveying some research on this and saying that the empirical side is really settled and the linguists who still go on telling their students that it isn’t are just not up-to-date.
The second is that in any case, only the most exceptional L2 learners can in practice expect to ever achieve native-like fluency.
It seems you are talking about being self-conscious, not about language fluency.
Why in the world would there be “in-principle impossibilities”—where does this idea even come from? What possible mechanism do you have in mind?
Well, let’s get specific. Which test do you assert native speakers will pass and ESL people will not (except for the “most exceptional”)?
I didn’t say it was about fluency. But I don’t think it’s about self-consciousness, either. Native speakers of a language pick the appropriate tense and aspect forms of verbs perfectly effortlessly—or how often do you hear a native speaker of English use a progressive in a case where it strikes you as inappropriate and you would say that they should really have used a plain tense here, for example?* - while for L2 speakers, it is generally pretty hard to grasp all the details of a language’s tense/aspect system.
*I’m choosing the progressive as an example because it’s easiest to describe, not because I think it’s a candidate for serious unacquirability. It’s known to be quite hard for native speakers of a language that has no aspect, but it’s certainly possible to get to a point where you don’t use the progressive wrongly essentially ever.
For syntax, you would really need to be a strong Chomskian to expect any such things. For semantics, it seems to be a bit more plausible a priori: maybe as an adult, you have a hard time learning new ways of carving up the world?
I don’t know of a pass/fail format test, but I expect reading speed and the speed of their speech to be lower in L2 speakers than in L1 speakers of comparable intelligence. I would also expect that if you measure cognitive load somehow, language processing in an L2 requires more of your capacity than processing your L1. I would also expect that the active vocabulary of L1 speakers is generally larger than that of an L2 speaker even if all the words in the L1 speaker’s active lexicon are in the L2 speaker’s passive vocabulary.
I wonder if there’s an implication that colloquial language is more complex than high status language.
The things being measured are different. To a first approximation, all native speakers do maximally well at sounding like a native speaker.
Lumifer’s friend may indeed speak like a native speaker (though it’s rare for people who learned as adults to do so), but she cannot be better at it than “most ‘natives’”.
What she can be better at than most natives is:
Vocabulary.
Speaking a high-status dialect (e.g., avoiding third person singular “don’t”, double negatives, and “there’s” + plural).
Using complex sentence structures.
Avoiding disfluencies.
It is possible, though, for a lower-status dialect to be more complex than a higher-status one. Example: the Black English verb system.
Or maybe it means that high status and low status English have different difficulties, and native speakers tend to learn the one that their parents use (finding others harder) while L2 speakers learn to speak from a description of English which is actually a description of a particular high status accent (usually either Oxford or New England I think)
The “Standard American Accent” spoken in the media and generally taught to foriegners is the confusingly named “Midwestern” Accent, which due to internal migration and a subsequent vowel shift, is now mostly spoken in California and the Pacific Northwest.
Interestingly enough, my old Japanese instructor was a native Osakan, who’s natural dialect was Kansai-ben; despite this, she conducted the class using the standard, Tokyo Dialect.