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From: rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik)
Subject: Re: grammar that includes semantics
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Date: Sat, 15 Apr 1995 14:28:32 GMT
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In article <3mnse3$4p7@riscsm.scripps.edu>,
Mark Israel <misrael@scripps.edu> wrote:
>In article <D7228s.Kyr@eskimo.com>, rickw@eskimo.com (Richard Wojcik) writes:
>> You juxtapose two passages from different threads as if they somehow 
>> contradicted each other.
>
>   They do.  Paul Ivsin had brought up the sentence *"This fact has no
>truth in it"; I brought up the sentence "Fowler's facts are wrong."  He
>then used the word "grammaticality" to distinguish the latter sentence
>from the former.  I queried his use of the word "grammaticality", and
>he called it "unexceptional".  Your assertion that "this kind of anomaly is 
>no longer considered a 'grammatical' violation in anybody's theory, to my 
>knowledge" is relevant to this.

My use of the single quotes around "grammatical" should have alerted you to
the fact that I was using the term in a special way.  That is, I was using
it in the sense that Chomsky (and Katz) did circa 1965 to characterize a
constraint on the phrasal groupings of words in a sentence.  I don't think
that Ivsin was using the term in quite the same way in his (totally
unrelated) passage.  The Chomsky-Katz position generated a lot of criticism
in the late 60's, and linguists no longer treat semantic anomaly as a type
of constraint on syntactic configurations.  I don't think that Ivsin was
trying to do that, but I'm not exactly sure what point he was trying to make.
-- 
Rick Wojcik  rickw@eskimo.com     Seattle (for locals: Bellevue), WA
             http://www.eskimo.com/~rickw/
