Native speakers’ reactions to modern English usage*

Abstract

The article deals with the question of usage in modern American English. In order to find out native speakers’ reactions to language use, a questionnaire was devised which includes 48 sentences of disputable correctness, 12 sentences where the appropriate question tag had to be supplied, and 11 sets of sentences with alternative grammatical constructions. Native speakers were asked to categorize the first 48 sentences according to four degrees of correctness, and rank the 11 sets of sentences in order of preference. 1200 questionnaires were sent to randomly chosen people in the USA and 207 were returned. These questionnaires were then analyzed statistically and interpreted linguistically. Some of the findings will be presented in this paper.