Horace wrote: “Just as usage wills it to be, in whose power lie judgment, law and the norm of speech”. This passage is often quoted with the aim, on the one hand, of questioning the authority of precepts formulated by grammarians, and on the other, to legitimize whatever usage of words that has occurred at any one time. Is usage a definitive criterion through which to establish what syntactic structures should be? Do grammarians, in fact, build a whimsical barrier which limits the possible ways …
Read moreHorace wrote: “Just as usage wills it to be, in whose power lie judgment, law and the norm of speech”. This passage is often quoted with the aim, on the one hand, of questioning the authority of precepts formulated by grammarians, and on the other, to legitimize whatever usage of words that has occurred at any one time. Is usage a definitive criterion through which to establish what syntactic structures should be? Do grammarians, in fact, build a whimsical barrier which limits the possible ways words can be arranged in sentences? Or perhaps the principles proposed by grammarians have something to do with the normal use of language? The aim of the present article is to set out usage as the category that can be best understood as the definitive criterion for the arrangement of words.
