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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