Herb,
 
You've called attention to your first-of-term grammaticality quiz a couple of times and maybe would like some response.  List, forgive me for this diversion.
 
The sentences are almost all ungrammatical in the sense that peoples' grammars do not allow its interpretation.  You may want to say that the first "ungrammaticality" is a matter of pragmatics, and the second a matter of semantics, etc., but the first still comes down on the side of being difficult to interpret because of its syntax and the second because of its content.  Wouldn't a constraint based grammar rule out the degree of self imbedding in the first and the semantic anomalies of the second?  If these sentences could not be detected as ungrammatical, wouldn't it indicate a  deficiency in the structure of the grammatical description or a special limitation on the concept of grammaticality? 
The third through sixth sentences are ungrammatical only in the sense that they are colloquial or informal.  Some rules of grammar are there because of the social need to be logical and ordered.  They are typical of the speech of less mature individuals.  Anyone used to communication in these registers must realize that grammatical constraints can vary by the social situation.  Number six might be avoided, but only because it uses words that are conversationally based.  What I'm referring to is the "couldn't" to deny the possibility and "not sleeping" to quote a claim in the conversational context.  (The double negative may have nothing to do with its avoidance.) 
 
The seventh sentence can only be interpreted because of the familiar combination of concepts in the words that suggest that an adjustment to the jumbled word order will bring out the meaning. 
 
The last sentence may have its spelling updated, but you need to put "hit" in quotation marks.  The constructions are simply not according to the modern idiom.  But a few times through does allow a perfectly good interpretation.  I suspect that even in 1490 this sentence was just a bit formal, yet perfectly fit for the printed medium, like many of today's research papers in linguistics. 
 
Bruce

>>> "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]> 09/07/06 7:07 AM >>>

Ed,

 

Interesting sentence.  It’s worth noting that the passive progressive, with “being” has been acceptable in English only since the mid to late 19th c.  Up until that time, Standard English would have required

 

The train must have been repairing.

 

This older usage is preserved in the Northern construction

 

The train needs repairing.

 

which has been replaced in a lot of dialects, including, to some degree, Northern by

 

The train needs to be repaired.

 

or the Lower North and Southern

 

The train needs repaired.

 

Your point on grammaticality, though, is well taken.  The double “be” is uncomfortable for a lot of speakers for the same reason that doubling of other function words feels awkward and is usually resolved by haplology.

 

But grammaticality is a multi-dimensional concept, one that we tend to dumb down.  I use the following sentences at the beginning of my grammar classes to get students thinking about what we mean when we say that a sentence is grammatical—or ungrammatical.  The first one throws them consistently, especially when I tell them that it is grammatically unexceptionable.

 

1.  The policeman the boy the dog bit called came.

 

2.      “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”1

 

3.      Me and Bill went fishing last weekend.

 

4.      The Sears Tower was a building higher than which no other had ever been built.

 

5.      That ain’t no house I’d want to live in.

 

6.      The guard couldn’t have been not sleeping.

 

7.      Upon were a there time three once bears.

 

8.      “Then I pray all them that shall read in this little treatise to hold me for excused for the translating of hit.”2

 

1Chomsky, Noam A.  1957.  Syntactic Structures.  The Hague:  Mouton.

2Caxton, William.  1490.  Prologue to his translation of Eneydos.  Reprinted in  W. F. Bolton, ed, The English Language:  Essays by English and American Men of Letters 1490-1839, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1966.  (Spelling modernized.)

 

Herb

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 10:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On innate knowledge of language

 

I think I understand Johanna's point quite well, but perhaps I did not make my own point clear.  I was not trying to say that some students have greater CONSCIOUS knowledge of grammar than their teachers, but rather greater unconscious knowledge.  Let me try an example.  Is the following sentence grammatical or not:

     The train must have been being repaired.

I know from asking students and teachers that their answers may differ.  But even on simpler matters, such as what modifies what in a sentence or how a given word functions, the intuitions of some people are stronger than others, in my experience.
     This is not to deny that EVERY native speaker has an enormous intuitive knowledge of her or his native language.

Ed S.

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