[914] in tlhIngan-Hol
Re: Re[4]: "movie"mey, etc. (was: RE: RESENT: Bounced Mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri May 21 01:54:44 1993
Errors-To: tlhIngan-Hol-request@village.boston.ma.us
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Reply-To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
From: SPEERS@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu
To: "Klingon Language List" <tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us>
Date: Fri, 21 May 1993 00:26 EDT
X-Vms-To: IN%"tlhIngan-Hol@village.boston.ma.us"
The question of "What is grammatical," is quite central, at least to
the kind of linguistic study *I'm* interested in. We are cautioned
against speakers' ruling out a particular utterance simply because
it's pragmatically odd, while it may be *grammatically* fine.
Chomsky's well-known example of this is: "Curious green ideas sleep
furiously." (If I have this wrong, other linguists will correct me.
The gist is right.) The point is, native speakers would flag this,
but it's _syntactically_ sound. (I do, after all, study syntax.)
The question of (in)transivity is at least partly syntactic, although
I'm more comfortable with complement/adjunct, as I've said before. (I
said it in Klingon, and I don't know how clear I was!!). Just because
a native speaker would rule out "vIQong" doesn't mean it's
*ungrammatical*. I would never say "I fly the bus," but it's not a
transivity issue. So, something to add to the list is, if "vIQong" is
flagged as ungrammatical by the native speaker (wink, wink), is it
syntactically ill-formed, or just pragmatically incorrect?
Holtej
