Peter,
Your first sentence is an example of the
importance of context. Decontextuatlized it doesn’t sound good, but in
conversation, I have heard and would readily say it. The center for a women’s basketball
team comes through the door, and I could see myself saying, “Girl is tall”.
The lack of the article is a function of the immediacy of the referent. In
your second sentence you have what is essentially a problem of morphophonemics,
that is, the interaction sounds and morphological properties. In this case,
the a/an alternation, we have a morphophonemic rule that “an” loses its
consonant if the next word begins with a consonant sound. It’s about sounds,
not letters. It is grammatical only in a very broad sense that anything
involving the structure of language is about grammar.
By the way, my description of the a/an
alternation as n-deletion rather than n-insertion (“insert an /n/ before a word
beginning with a vowel sound”) is historically the more accurate. a/an comes
historically from the Old English word for “one” , ân, and historically, during
the Middle English period, the /n/ dropped before a consonant sound.
One of the odd consequences, by the way,
of the way we treat the grammar of “an” popularly has to do with words with an
initial orthographic <h>. We say “an honor” without the /h/. But we say
“a hospital” in this country but not in
Herb
On 4/16/06, Peter
Adams <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
On page 41 of Noguchi's Grammar and the
Teaching of Writing, he distinguishes between two kinds of rules: descriptive
rules of the English language and prescriptive rules about language. He
points out that a sentence like "Girl is the tall." violates descriptive
rules and, therefore, is not an English sentence. On the other hand,
"Sam ain't going" violates the prescriptive rule against using
"ain't," and so is an English sentence but just doesn't conform to
the prescriptive rules.
I'm wondering what Noguchi would say about sentences like the following:
Girl is tall.
An girl is tall.
Which kind of rule do they violate?
Peter Adams
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