Among vs Between
The words 'among' and 'between' are common prepositions in Standard English (SE), but their use keeps defeating West Indians, including Trinbagonians. One important part of the reason for our troubles with them is that we did/do not acquire them in native SE contexts, and another is that, in unthinking loyalty to the prescriptivist tradition, we were taught, and continue to be taught, their usage badly. We've been prescriptively taught that 'between' is required before nouns and pronouns that denote a set of two things, while 'among' is required before nouns and pronouns that denote a larger set, that is, three or more things. This prescriptive rule turns out to be wrong when matched with actual usage in Standard English.
Partly because of the rule, Trinbagonians produce unacceptable sentences like the following:
1. *She had flour AMONG her fingers.
2. *I put the shovel somewhere AMONG the backdoor, the tool shed, and the mango tree.
In both sentences, 'among' should give way to 'between', but then, that would violate our time-honoured rule. In sentence (1), we will normally interpret the number of fingers to be 10, and if not 10, certainly more than 2; so if the rule was correct, we should choose 'among'. And yet, actual usage tells us we should say 'She had flour BETWEEN her fingers'. Similarly, in sentence (2), there are more than two things after 'among', so that that preposition should be the acceptable one. But actual usage is at variance with the rule, having 'between' instead. If there is dissonance between the prescription and the actual usage, should we go with the prescription or the usage?
If you find yourself questioning the usage, then you have been badly taught. If you accept the usage, then most likely you have learnt to say and write the right thing despite being badly taught, which behaviour probably developed after secondary school.
One of the very serious effects of the rule is that actual (i.e., 'correct') usage has been, and is being, marked wrong by teachers, and unacceptable sentences have been deemed right. So that sentences like our two above would even today be considered right and sentences like these would be considered wrong:
3. She had flour BETWEEN her fingers.
4. I put the shovel somewhere BETWEEN the backdoor, the tool shed, and the mango tree.
The problem with our prescriptive rule is that it sees the difference between 'among' and 'between' as a matter of the size of the set of things denoted by the nouns/pronouns. But when we carefully study actual usage, we find 'between' is used when the members of the set are considered INDIVIDUALLY, while 'among' is used when they are considered COLLECTIVELY. In (3), for example, the flour is located between one finger and finger(s) adjacent to it, and in (4), the shovel is located between the three things seen as individual points in a triangular area. Native speakers of SE know these facts intuitively.
But when we take the members of a set COLLECTIVELY rather than individually, we need to use 'among', as, for example, in the sentences below:
5. AMONG the Trinbagonian novelists I've read, Earl Lovelace stands out as supreme.
6. The teacher paced AMONG the class.
In respect of (6) in particular, the noun 'class' has a notional meaning something like 'three or more students', but it is not the fact that there are three or more students that requires the choice of 'among', but rather the fact that the students are seen collectively rather than individually.
Some students eventually acquire the target usage despite misguided teaching, but think of how many more students would get it right if teachers were more careful about the facts of Standard English.
(Incidentally, have you noticed that Creole has adopted the preposition 'between' but avoids 'among'? I wonder why?
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