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WBE1. PRESCRIPTIVE RULES

Part 1:

1 This sentence ends in a preposition. Prescriptively it should be In(to) what did you put the present?

2 The complement of a comparative is supposed to be in the nominative case. Prescrip- tively, this should be She’s smarter than he. The reasoning is that the sentence is really a shortening of She’s smarter than he is.

3 This sentence has a split infinitive (to boldly go). Prescriptively, this should be to go boldly where no man has gone before.

4 Slow is an adjective, not an adverb, but here it modifies a verb. The prescriptively correct form is He walks too slowly.

5 The adverb hopefully is supposed to only mean “in a hopeful manner”; the weather is unlikely to be hopeful. Prescriptively it should be I hope that the weather will turn sunny soon.

6 The string of words that follows something is a restrictive relative clause and should be introduced by that. An alternate non-restrictive meaning could be forced by in- serting a comma before the which. Prescriptively this should be I found out something that will disturb you greatly.

7 Who represents the object of the verb see, so should be in the accusative form whom (i.e., Whom did you see?).

8 This one is hard for American speakers to spot. Hardly is a negative adverb, so this is seen as a case of double negation. In prescriptive terms it should be I can hardly sleep.

9 Less is supposed to be used with mass nouns (nouns like water or air) and item is not a mass noun, so prescriptively this should be 10 items or fewer.

10 The prescriptively correct form is different from. Than is supposed to be a conjunction rather than a preposition, and so can’t be used to connect an adjective with a pro- noun. So prescriptively this should be My view of grammar is different from yours.

11 At least in prescriptive British English, the correct future auxiliary that is used with first-person subjects (i.e., I, we) is shall, not will. So, this is prescriptively I shall not enjoy it.

12 When the word if marks a counterfactual conditional (i.e., it is used to describe a state of being that isn’t actually true), then the verb should be in its subjunctive form. So, this sentence would be If I were a linguist, then I wouldn’t have to study prescriptive rules.

13 Prescriptive grammarians tell us to avoid passives. Sentence (m) is a passive. The active form of this would be something like You didn’t complete the homework effi- ciently.

14 According to prescriptive grammar each other is only supposed to be used when there are two participants, so “proper” grammar would have this as All of the linguists at the conference congratulated one another.

15 Me is the accusative form of the pronoun, so it’s supposed to be used only in object positions or after a preposition. In this sentence, the pronoun is in the subject position so it’s supposed to be the nominative I. The order of the noun John and the pronoun is also reversed from prescriptive order. The “correct” form for this sentence is John and I are going to the movies later.

16 The conjunction like is supposed to mean “similar to” rather than “as an example”. So, the prescriptive interpretation of this sentence is one where the speaker wants to learn a language that’s similar to French, but not French itself. Prescriptively, if you intend an “as an example” meaning you’re supposed to use such as instead of like: I want to learn a new language, such as French.

Part 2: The answer to this part of the question will be a personal one. You might truly find some of these sentences unacceptable, but others you might be surprised are judged “wrong” at all. Personally, I find my inner voice balks a bit at (d), (f), and (l). However, the rest sound like things I might say every day. This said, from a descriptive point of view, you will find that native speakers of English will all utter sentences like these “ungrammatical” ones. In many cases, they’re probably far more common in actual speech and writing than the “correct” forms. So, if we’re being scientists, we’re going to want to concentrate on what people actually do rather than on what so-called experts tell us to do.

WBE2. SCIENTIFIC METHOD PRACTICE

Question 1: Sentence (d) is predicted by the hypothesis: The first word in the declara- tive/statement form is the second word in the yes/no question, and vice versa.

Question 2: Sentence (f), however, is not predicted: it is the fourth word of sentence (e) that appears first in the question.

Question 3: Hypothesis 1 predicts that the yes/no question form of sentence (9) would be *Old the hobbit will eat the magic beans. The second word (old) is inverted with the first (the).

Question 4: Hypothesis 2 should be something like “Yes/no questions are formed by moving the auxiliary of the equivalent declarative sentence to the front” or “Yes/no questions are formed by reversing the positions of the subject and the auxiliary.” Your wording may vary.

WB3. USING CORPORA FOR DOING SYNTACTIC RESEARCH

Question 1: For me, sentence (d) is only grammatical with a lot of context (see the sentences in answer to Question 4 below), but to the extent it’s okay, it has to mean that Sean puffed air across him. Sentence (c) by contrast is completely grammatical and can mean either “Sean didn’t show up for their meeting” or “Sean used a puff of air to clear all the dust off of him”.

Question 2: Because of the way Google and search engines like it work, the exact numbers for this experiment will vary from day to day. But the general pattern of effect should be found no matter when the experiment is done. Here are the results I got on June 4th, 2019. The numbers are not exact, as Google only offers an approximation once the numbers get large enough.

i) blow me off 0000007474% ngrams

ii) blow off me no valid ngrams

The fact that (ii) doesn’t even show up in the database is telling.

Question 3: There seems to be a correspondence between our judgments of meaning and the statistics here. The form most English speakers either find ungrammatical or consider to have a very limited and non-idiomatic meaning, i.e. (iv), is absent from the google books database.

Question 4: On June 10, 2019, the top hits were:

e) Time to let the stink blow off me.

f) …doing blow off me.

Example (e) clearly has the “puff of air” meaning. I’ve edited the context for (f), because some readers may find the original tweet offensive, but in this case blow is not being used as a verb, but as a noun referring to the drug cocaine. In neither case does it have the “didn’t show up” reading.

What does this mean for us as syntacticians? Sometimes corpora can be used to verify judgments we have about structure. But the statistics don’t get at one important fact about the sentences above: The rare form is restricted in meaning as well.

WBE4. SEMANTIC VS. SYNTACTIC JUDGMENTS

1 Semantically odd. Sausages don’t have mothers-in-law (among other strange things about this sentence).

2 This is semantically hard to understand, but it’s probably due to a syntactic effect. English doesn’t typically allow you to have multiply displaced questions words like what and who.

3 Syntactic. The order of the words is clearly wrong.

4 Semantically strange. This is a contradiction. Andrew can’t both be professor and not a professor at the same time. (Although I’m not always doing syntax in real life!)

5 There are a couple of syntactic peculiarities here. Danced is either a past tense or a past participle and shouldn’t appear as the subject of the sentence (we might expect dancing instead). In English (but not in many other languages), you don’t “have tired”; you “are tired”. Finally, make typically doesn’t take a non-finite clause (marked by the to). We expect something more like dancing makes me tired. Note that the sentence is perfectly comprehensible and meaningful, even though it’s not a sentence that any native speaker of English would ever utter.

WBE5. I-LANGUAGE VS. E-LANGUAGE

This exercise is pretty tricky. That’s because e-languages can’t exist without a population of people who have the i-language, and people’s i-language exists because they are exposed to the e-language by their parents or caregivers. So, I’ve couched my answers in terms of probability, rather than absolutes. If you got a different answer, it doesn’t mean you were wrong.

1 Primarily e-language. We are talking about how a particular code is spoken in various places, by many people. We’re talking about the thing outside the human consciousness.

2 This is primarily i-language. We are talking about Maggie’s internal thought processes.

3 This is primarily e-language. We’re talking about the use of language on signs rather than in the mind of a speaker.

4 This one is tricky and there are arguments that it could be either i-language or e-language. If a syntactician said this, then they probably were talking about the internal grammar of a speaker. But if anyone else said it, they were probably talking about a collective agreement of French speakers about the order of words.

5 I think this is primarily i-language. We’re talking about Suzette’s mental ability to understand certain accents.