Mar 20, 2025
Still annoyed at my intro to linguistics teacher help me get over this, what do y'all native speakers think about this sentence:
She climbed down the tree
You can't climb down so this is wrong
What are you talking about thats a normal sentence
Climb down has a different meaning so this is wrong
Voting ended onMar 27, 2025
According to my teacher: you can't climb down something, and as a phrasal verb it just means to back down on a position/change your mind. Which I know it does. But also wtf I have definitely heard of climbing down a thing
Edit: Ok before this gets more traction, my teacher is not a Prescristivist, the term she used was "Semantically Ill-formed" not wrong, and this example I'm pretty sure was made by Chomsky.
