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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