2016年10月23日日曜日

ungrammatical/uninterpretable sentence?

A follow-up to "There is no one compares with you"

Among the examples Lambrecht presents, the followings are in fact spontaneous utterances by university professors:
(7) I have a friend from Chicago's gonna meet me downstairs.
(8) Check to see if your feature matrixes came out OK. I got a couple of' em
didn't come out right.
(9) I have a friend of mine in the history department teaches two courses per
semester.
(10) I have a friend in the Bay Area is a painter. (319)
Lambrecht continues to note how they feel about the sentences:
"...all of whom were convinced that the construction did not exist in their dialect or speech pattern. The person who uttered (8), a linguist interested in matters of discourse, had explicitly stated, after hearing me talk about the construction, that even though he had heard of such examples, they did not occur in his speech. In fact he considered them not only ungrammatical but uninterpretable. And the two sentences (9) and (10) were used spontaneously within fifteen minutes of unmonitored conversation by a professor whom I had interviewed earlier about the status of the construction in her speech and who had been almost insulted at the suggestion that it occurred in the speech of educated speakers." (320)
It's interesting that even those who felt "insulted" at the use of the construction among educated speakers actually use likewise without realising it.

I must examine how this seemingly substandard construction came into being and gained currency.

To be continued. . .

Works Cited:
Lambrecht, Knud. "There Was a Farmer Had a Dog: Syntactic Amalgams Revisited." Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 1988. 319-39.

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