a British perspective: at the BBC (and other media seem to have similar results)

admitted the charge - 140, to the charge - 3
admitted the charges - 120, to the charges - 3
admitted the offence - 150, to the offence 9

On the other hand, this is from the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service)
"After the offender has admitted to the offence ..."

Oxford Dictionaries allow both. Personally I think the to-less version sounds a bit more formal / official, and like PiteTeach I would probably be more comfortable using 'to' - "He admitted all the charges" sounds a bit strange to me. But then I've always thought redundancy overrated; I leave that sort of stuff to Perfect Pedant - now I wonder whatever happened to him? :)

@jayles - do I not remember you advocating keeping technical stuff to a minimum? I had no idea what your SV[OPT] meant until I saw your explanation, and realised I had told a student the same this morning (she had put place before object), but I just used the words. Do you really think QxSV[OPT] and SVOMPT or SxMpp[OPT] are simpler than saying clause? They may be a mnemonic for you, but the last one, for example, is just gobbledygook to me. Sorry.

@Mrs Davenport - I agree with you that a lot of comments of the 'it really annoys me' variety do tend to be pointed at what seem to be aimed at expressions which come from one or other Afro-American dialect - we had something similar about 'on tomorrow'.

But is also possible to talk about dialect in a purely observational and non-judgemental way, which is what I think Jasper was doing. I'm from Britain where we have hundreds of dialects, mostly regional, a few to do with ethnic background. Just listen to any British black comedian - they'll be doing Caribbean, more specifically Jamaican, Nigerian and LME (London multicultural English). And that's before we even get round to British Asian accents.

For many of us this is simply the rich tapestry that makes up English, and something to be celebrated. Talking about dialect, or attributing something to a particular ethnic group isn't per se disparaging.

In any case, I imagine the majority of black and Asian Brits simply have the standard regional accent of the area they come from. And then of course you've got lots of 'professionals' from ethnic backgrounds with just as middle-class or posh accents as their white peers. Social class and regional geography probably play a much bigger role in accents in Britain than racial background.

In fact, most criticism of this sort in Britain is aimed at less-educated white kids, innit? (a word that probably has ethnic roots, but is now totally multi-racial, if not totally accepted).

Incidentally, I say black people (without a capital) because that's the standard term in the UK. Some people tried to introduce Afro-Caribbean thirty years or so ago, but it never caught on.

@jayles - I think I'll just stick with subject-verb inversion - to complete your quote from Marit Westergaard at Tromsø:

"Within traditional grammar, this is often called subject-verb inversion (e.g. Quirk et al.
1985), or VP inversion (e.g. Haukenes 1998)"

Quirk et al (The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language 1985) traditional grammar - I like that one! Well if that's traditional, I'm a traditionalist.

@Jasper - I've just noticed a difference between you two example sentences:

I do not love her nor hate her.
I have never hurt nor killed another person.

The second one works for me as it has a parallel structure, but the first one doesn't (for me at least). If we have a negating not, I think either the second half needs a subject, or we have to express it a different way - which is why I'd prefer something like:

I neither love her nor hate her. - correlative
I don't love her but nor do I hate her. - simple parallel negative (with compulsory inversion)

There really does seem to be a difference between a simple not and neither / never. The latter seem to form a natural parallel partnership with nor, but I'm not so sure not does.

@Jasper, I wouldn't call that fronting but simple inversion, which is compulsory after 'nor', whereas fronting is always optional:

She doesn't smoke, and nor do I.

Look at your own examples, for example the Helen Keller one, where the inversion is necessary. And look what happens when you add auxiliaries to your other examples - you have to invert:

I do not love her nor hate her. - I do not love her nor do I hate her.
(Or more natural for me - I neither love her nor hate her - at true correlative construction)

I have never hurt nor killed another person. I have never hurt another person nor have I killed one.

This inversion is just following the same rule as in 'Do do I', 'Neither do I', 'Nor do I' in short answers. It's not dependent on a previous negative.

Then there is negative and limiting adverb inversion, which is optional.

Never have I been so badly treated.
Only when I see her will I know the truth.
Little does he know what's in store for him.

Negative inversion, which is optional, could be seen as a kind of fronting, which is putting something before the subject when it usually follows it for special effect and is purely optional. It is most commonly used with adverbs of place and noun clauses (that clauses, wh-clauses, infinitive clauses)

I looked up and there he was.
What you're talking about I have no idea.
To run a marathon is my dream.
The water looked very inviting, so in we jumped.

@porsche - OK, I accept that we can use it idiomatically to mean no choice; here's one from the British National Corpus similar to yours - "Well he's got two choices, he can either eat them or starve.". But the vast majority of the 50 examples shown at the BNC do not have that meaning, but refer to a simple choice. The same if you do a Google Search for "have two choices", or look it up in Google Books.

http://bnc.bl.uk/saraWeb.php?qy=two+choices&mysubmit=Go

Interestingly, Googling ' "two choices" "no choice" ' brings up absolutely nothing relevant except for this page. At Google Books I did, however, find this:

'I had no choice' always, always translates to 'I had two choices, but one sucked. So really, I had no choice. Except I did.

Limiting the "two choices" "no choice" search to magazines brings up sixteen examples. None really qualify for this idiomatic meaning, although in a couple of cases one of the two real choices turned out to be so bad that in essence there was no choice, as in this one:

'Since they couldn't sell, they had two choices, hold or buy. Since the institutions are practically the only buyers of IBM, any decision to hold will also result in a declining price ... If they sell or hold the stock goes down. They have no choice'

I actually found moonwave's theory about the idiomatic expression coming from 'two chances' rather interesting, and followed up on it. Reading his post again, however, it seems I missed his opening 'When', and thought he was suggesting that this was the general meaning of 'two choices', which in fact he wasn't. In that respect I concede my mistake. But I still maintain that this jokey use is a minority one, at least in written English. I also think it might be more prevalent in your branch of English than mine, but have no evidence for that.

@Jasper - she's not against teaching grammar, but would prefer it through writing, not teaching a lot of (sometimes silly) rules before getting the students to write anything. And I think the author was mainly referring to stuff like parsing and diagramming, and being forced on people that weren't that interested.

Traditional grammar teaching in Britain up to the sixties was widely believed to stifle creativity, which as why it was ditched.

But there are always exceptions, and the fact that we comment on this forum probably means we are rather more interested in grammar than most people. Personally, I'm fascinated by the stuff - but real grammar, not all the stupid prescriptions and proscriptions (which she also mentions in her article) which often pass for grammar in writing schools. But best read the article yourself; the link is in my last-but-one comment.

@jayles - I quite agree with you about terminology, and in class I use the least possible, except where it can make life easier. It's a bit different on my blog, but people come to that from choice. The only reason we teach grammar is to try and speed up the process of learning the language, not so that they learn about grammar per se. Also the grammar we teach is very much based on real natural English.

A much bigger problem is the way grammar is taught to native speakers. The writer of that Atlantic article thinks that traditional grammar teaching has a negative effect on students, cramping their writing and generally pitting them off English. Which is why, of course, it was ditched in Britain at the end of the 60s. The only thing is that they haven't really come up with anything to replace it that would be both helpful and interesting for school pupils. Personally I think a comparative approach has the best chances (dialect and standard - discussing the differences rather than knocking dialect use).

@jayles - I'll have you know that the 'purist' English spoken in Britain is said to be that of Inverness, so I'm not sure why you pick out the Scots for special attention; try understanding a Geordie after he's had a pint or two!

Yesterday was National Grammar Day in the US, and one or two people have been asking the same question as you.

http://www.arrantpedantry.com/2014/03/04/why-teach-grammar/

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-wrong-way-to-teach-grammar/284014/