Building Non-Normative Systems - the Search for Robustness an Overview

The teacher consciously stonewalls when confronted with non-standard usage to prescribe quite rigidly what is acceptable linguistic usage and what is not. What is so artificial about this behavlour, of course, is that our implicit linguistic models are descriptive and not prescriptive; they model what we expect, not what we demand. People are quite good at understanding language which they, when asked, would consider to he non-standard in some way or other.