Eduard,

Let me try this again.  

"Grammatical" has at least two widely accepted meanings.  In linguistics
it's concept used to distinguish between sentences a native speaker
would recognized as possible in the native language and those that he or
she would not so recognize.  By this common linguistic usage, your first
sentence is clearly ungrammatical.  You may not like this definition,
but it is one of some linguistic importance and considerable utility.

The second sense refers to judgments people make as to what seems to
them to be appropriate usage in formal standard English.  Having taught
English for most of my life at this point, I have learned that these
judgments vary considerably, based on age, region, experience with
editing and correcting, and simply personal preference.  And very often
these judgments are made with little sensitivity to context.

Here's an example that some educated speakers of English, including
colleagues and students in my English department, have told me is
ungrammatical because the use of "it" in it is redundant.

Hillary simply hates it that she's not considered a liberal.

Now, one may also say

Hillary simply hates that she's not considered a liberal.

The difference is that the extraposed structure (with "it"), a term
introduced, I believe, by Otto Jespersen to describe this sort of
construction, is used when the speaker/writer wishes to emphasize the
newness or contrastiveness of the that-clause.  

I don't know how you would judge these two sentences, but clearly there
are skilled editors and language teachers who would come down on either
side, as I have found with my colleagues.

There are contexts, perhaps, where the "for" of the example we've been
discussing would feel redundant, in which case I too would encourage a
student writer to remove it, but I would be delighted if my student had
a sufficiently subtle sense of language to tell the difference and to
know when it WOULD be appropriate to use it.

In short, I would not consider the presence or absence of "for" in that
sentence to be a matter of grammaticality but rather a matter of
appropriateness to context.  Redundancy is a bit too coarse a measure
for choices like this.

Herb



Herb:

Asking are I not you what understand do. Space and time do not allow 
me to elaborate on the notion of grammaticality, and I do not plan 
to write a book on this matter at this time. If the definition of a 
grammatical sentence is "any sentence identified by a native speaker 
as grammatical," then this forum has no purpose because whatever the 
students write is "grammatical." 

A language corpus, while it "probably wouldn't help us to sharpen 
the focus any, since that would simply be a large collection of 
sentences found in actual texts," would provide us with information 
about the word *collocation,* and that would be helpful in solving 
the problem posed by the sentence under analysis. 
 
I have noticed that most of the people who have a "fuzzy" perception 
of "grammar" belong to the "native" speakers of English, the people 
who are "born with gramar in their heads," and who "have more 
grammar in their heads than in all the grammar books ever written." 
Foreigners do not have too much trouble understanding what English 
gramar is. 

Do you have any idea what is reason for such a situation?

Eduard 


On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Herbert F.W. Stahlke wrote...

>Eduard,
>
>Could you define more clearly what you mean by "grammatical 
sentence"?
>The term is defined formally among generative linguists as any 
sentence
>generated by the grammar.  Informally, this has generally been 
taken to
>mean any sentence identified by a native speaker as grammatical.  
There
>is, granted, a certain circularity to the relationship between 
theory
>and method here.  Prescriptively a grammatical sentence would be one
>that is devoid of what a particular instantiation of prescriptive
>grammar defines as grammatical error.  In general, I'd have to say 
that
>the notion "grammatical sentence" is at best fuzzy.  The use of a 
corpus
>probably wouldn't help us to sharpen the focus any, since that would
>simply be a large collection of sentences found in actual texts.  
Their
>grammaticality is rarely an issue in a corpus.  A good example of 
this
>is Sidney Greenbaum's _The Oxford English Grammar_, based on the 
ICE-GB
>and Wall Street Journal corpora.  My students have found some of his
>examples, mostly taken from these corpora, to be of questionable
>grammaticality.
>
>So on what basis are you judging either form of the sentence under
>discussion as grammatical or ungrammatical?  By the way, I find them
>both grammatical--on either of the fuzzy criteria.
>
>Herb

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