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Avoidance This is the sort of English up with which I will not put. (Attributed by Gowers to Winston Churchill. There is no convincing evidence that Churchill said this, and good reason to believe that he did not.) The sentence "does not demonstrate the absurdity of using [prepositional phrase] fronting instead of stranding; it merely illustrates the ungrammaticality resulting from fronting something that is not a constituent". Compound use "A father of a little boy goes upstairs after supper to read to his son, but he brings the wrong book. The boy says, 'What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?'" Parallel between noun phrases and verb phrases with respect to argument structureThe enemy destroyed the city. The enemy's destruction of the city. Sentences with unexpected endings. She spread the bread with socks.Comparative illusion: More people have been to Russia than I have. Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Noam Chomsky): example that is grammatically correct but based on semantic combinations that are contradictory and therefore would not normally occur. Hold the news reader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers. Demonstrations of sentences where the semantic interpretation is bound to context or knowledge of the world. The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam: ambiguous use of a pronoun: The word "it" refers to the table being made of Styrofoam

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Norris Bernhard

Lvl 10
4y ago

What else can I help you with?