#grammaticality

Hey, Bae Area- and NorCal (Northern California, USA)-native wugs!

Series: Arguing Linguistically

Grammaticality and Subtleness?? No way!!!!

Some valid English sentences you will not believe they are valid at all

Could you all help me with a grammaticality judgement test?

Context: John likes Mary more than Bill does.

Question: Who does John like Mary more than?

Answer: Bill.

Is the question and answer pair a legitimate one given the context? I just can't tell anymore!

Definition:

(1) The sound your grammaticality judgements make as they fly out the window.

(2) The herald of doubts that you no longer know your own native language.

Diagnosis:

Seven implausibly grammatical sentences from Mental Floss: 

1. ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. HOW HE GOT INTO MY PAJAMAS I'LL NEVER KNOW.

Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the first part to be

One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas].

But another possible, and perfectly grammatical, reading is

One morning [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas].

4. THE RAT THE CAT THE DOG CHASED KILLED ATE THE MALT.

Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take "the rat ate the malt" and stick in more information to make "the rat the cat killed ate the malt."  But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.

7. THIS EXCEEDING TRIFLING WITLING, CONSIDERING RANTING CRITICIZING CONCERNING ADOPTING FITTING WORDING BEING EXHIBITING TRANSCENDING LEARNING, WAS DISPLAYING, NOTWITHSTANDING RIDICULING, SURPASSING BOASTING SWELLING REASONING, RESPECTING CORRECTING ERRING WRITING, AND TOUCHING DETECTING DECEIVING ARGUING DURING DEBATING.

This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could "run to great excess" in the use of –ing participles "without violating any rule of our common grammars," and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn't seem so complicated once you realize it means,

"This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate."

Read the rest of the sentences in the article. 

These weird-but-grammatical sentences illustrate an important fact about sentence construction: we don't just use syntactic rules to put words together, but we also need to consider how much memory or processing power is available to make sense of them. If you put enough thought into these seven sentences, you can get them to mean something reasonable, but it definitely takes a bit more thinking.