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The first three linked tasks of this consolidation chapter aim at helping you distinguish language use which is really ‘ungrammatical’ according to standard English, as opposed to ‘difficult to process’ or ‘nonsensical’ (Task 1.1), uses which represent regional and / or social variation (Task 1.2), and uses which are ruled out by prescriptivists only (Task 1.3). Task 1.1 Take a close look at sentences (a) to (j) and decide which ones are grammatical, which ones are marginally grammatical (and should therefore be preceded by ‘?’ to indicate uncertain acceptability) and which ones are ungrammatical (and should therefore be preceded by ‘*’) in the variety of English you are most familiar with. Make sure you distinguish ‘ungrammatical’ from ‘nonsensical’ (which is a semantic concept) and / or ‘difficult to process’ (which refers to how easy / difficult it is to understand a sentence when you read / hear it). a. I will try to give up smoking this year . b. Give up smoking I will certainly try to . c. To give up smoking, I will certainly try . d. I never heard a green horse smoke a dozen oranges . e. He’s muscular and a pretty good mat wrestler . f. Go you to school . g. Run youse to the telephone . h. Clive promised Claire to shave himself . i. Clive promised Claire to shave herself . j. The claim that the link between convection heating and the time and energy which can be saved by baking biscuits in a convection oven rather than a conventional oven is not obvious at first sight is undoubtedly true . Huddleston and Pullum et al. (2002: 11) suggest that, when judging grammaticality, [t]he evidence we use comes from several sources: our own intuitions as native speakers of the language; the reactions of other native speakers we consult when we are in doubt; data from computer corpora . . . and data presented in dictionaries and other scholarly work on grammar. We alternate between the different sources and cross-check them against each other, since intuitions can be misleading and texts can contain errors. Issues of interpretation often arise. As you can see, English is not contained in any one’s brain, dictionary or grammar book, so we need to rely on many different sources of information when making grammaticality judgements. |
