Re: LUNATIC SURVEY: 2005

Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:

> (I think Andreas intended this to go to the full list.  I suspect
> this is not his fault, since as I said my university is transitioning
> to a new email system right now, and there are obviously lots of
> kinks still to be ironed out.)
Yes, it was meant to go to the list. It appears your mail system is behaving the
same way as gmail wrt replies.

> >Quoting Thomas Wier <trwier@...>:
> >> Briefly, there seems to
> >> be an assymetry between the kind of long-distance dependency in
> >> multiple wh-word constructions between, such that in English you
> >> can't say *"Whom did who see?", but in German you can say "Wen liebt
> >> wer?"
> >
> >It's funny. I've never been consciously aware of that English rule before,
> and
> >when stated like this it strikes me as entirely bizarre. Yet, I realize I
> >actually do obey it when speaking or writing English. The twist is that the
> >thought to put a such rule into a conlang would, before Thomas pointed it
> out,
> >never have occured to me, despite me being a fluent speaker of a language
> that
> >has it.
>
> Yeah.  There are all sorts of extremely subtle properties of
> language that totally get missed in standard grammars. Understandably
> so, since how often does the possibility even arise that one needs to
> use multiple wh-constructions, or potentially violate island constraints,
> in real life?
Not too infrequently, I'd think. At least, _vem såg vem?_ ("who saw whom?")
*feels* like the sort of thing I hear on a regular basis.

I sometimes wonder what proportion of the English grammatical rules I obey I'm
actually aware of.

                                                 Andreas