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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/