Re: USAGE: Garden paths

John Cowan wrote:

> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
>
> > I never produce those kinds of sentences either.  But I fail to produce them for
> > parsing reasons, not because they're ruled out by the grammar.
>
> It seems to me that this statement kicks the ball through your own goalposts.
> If you cannot generate these sentences, it is because the "outward bound"
> grammar fails to generate them.  Unless you think parsing is involved
> during production as well as during comprehension?
I do.  Or at least, I subscribe to a theory which does.  I use the term 'grammar' to
refer to the system of constraints/principles/rules/whatever which regulate sentence
production and comprehension, rather than the production and comprehension mechanisms
themselves--whatever they may be (given our limited knowledge of how the brain works
we're a pretty long way from cracking that one).


> > Again, I think
> > you're missing my point:  Garden path sentences demonstrate that *acceptability*
> > and *grammaticality* are two entirely different things!  A sentence can be
> > unacceptable without being ungrammatical.
>
> And sentences can be acceptable while ungrammatical, too.
Hmm.  I thought about that when I made my original comment, but when it came down to
it I couldn't actually think of any examples of acceptable but ungrammatical
constructions.  I suppose one example might be resumptive pronouns in relative
clauses, which English speakers routinely turn their noses up at, but which get
produced all the time:

  "I just talked to that man who I was wondering if you've ever met him."
  "That's the man who I just asked you why he wasn't at the party."

Whether these sentences are "acceptable" or not depends on what you mean, I guess...

It's easier to come up with sentences which are grammatically well-formed but appear
to be semantically vacuous.  A favourite example of mine is:

  "More people have been to Berlin than I have."

A perfectly natural sentence, but it has no coherent meaning whatsoever.  Think about
it...

Matt.