# Is there something missing when/if a grammatical feature is obsolete/absent?



## Villeggiatura

HI
Could we discuss the wisdom of having and not having a grammatical feature (case/number/etc.)?

For instance, if a case (e.g., locative) or a number (e.g.,dual) was once indispensable in a language, and later became obsolete in the same language, what exactly were lost since that language is just as effective in communication, creative writing, etc.?

By the same token, what exactly were lost when the conjugation was simplified?

From another angle, if a feature (e.g., article) is indispensable in Language A, absent in an unrelated Language B, what exactly is Language B missing?


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## Nino83

Villeggiatura said:


> if a case (e.g., locative) or a number (e.g.,dual) was once indispensable in a language, and later became obsolete


If it is replaced by another analytic construction, nothing was lost.
This is what happened from Latin to Romance languages, from Old English to Modern English, from Old Norse to Continental North Germanic languages.


Villeggiatura said:


> creative writing, etc.?


I think it is the same if we speak about syntax.
There are languages with subject-verb agreement and noun case markers where subject pronouns are required (Icelandic, German) and there are languages without subject-verb agreement where pronominal subjects are not required (Japanese, Chinese languages, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian).
Sometimes things are not so simple. For example, in sentences like "They say that John doesn’t speak French, but *he* does" the subject pronoun is mandatory in  Czech,  Polish, Finnish, North Saami, Malayalam, Telugu (that have subject-verb agreement), Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin (that have no subject-verb agreement) while it is not mandatory in Amharic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic (that have verbal agreement), Japanese, Korean(that have no subject-verb agreement).
Source: NULL SUBJECTS AND POLARITY FOCUS, Anders Holmberg.


Villeggiatura said:


> if a feature (e.g., article) is indispensable in Language A, absent in an unrelated Language B, what exactly is Language B missing?


Speaking about syntax, it depends on the language.
For example, Italian has a verbal passive conjugation and lacks noun case but word order is more flexible than in Japanese, that has both passive conjugation and noun case. This because in Japanese the verb has a fixed position, i.e it must be verb final.
Il ladro è stato arrestato (lit. the thief is been arrested) = È  stato arrestato il ladro (lit. is been arrested the thief) = The thief was (has been) arrested.
犯人は逮捕された Hannin wa taihosareta. (lit. criminal nom. was arrested) = The criminal was arrested.
逮捕された犯人 Taihosareta hannin wa. (lit. was arrested criminal nom.) = The criminal that was arrested. (relative clause)

In other words, languages don't follow strict rules like "case system = more flexibility" or "subject-verb agreement = pro-drop or null-subject" and so on.
These are only tendencies.


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## danielstan

Speaking of "wisdom" in relation with languages evolution is, in my opinion, incorrect.
We may not qualify a language as "clever" (nor imply that its speakers are "clever").

The evolution of a language (every language is in a continuous transformation!) is the result of the choices that its speakers are doing every day, in a non-conscious way.

I have learnt Russian in school, at a basic level. Russian has a complex case system with specific words ending for each case. I find its declension system as complex as the Latin's one.
For me and my colleagues it was very difficult to memorize and to apply correctly the nouns endings according to their grammatical case, so difficult that after 1 year we almost dropped the cases and replaced them by prepositions (literally translated from Romanian). The professor was not happy, he insisted that we pronounce each word very clear so that he may hear the termination, while we were doing the opposite: at word's end our voice was fading.

I see a similar scenario in the evolution of Latin to Romance languages:
- there were centuries (I BC, I-II century AD) when the number of Latin speakers increased by 100%, so half the Latin speakers were learning it from the other half (of which many families spoke Latin since 1 or 2 generations)
The complexity of the Latin declension system was replaced by its (non native) speakers with almost 1 case declension and a lot of prepositions to express the case.

Bulgarian language (which originally had a complex Slavic declension system with different words ending for each case) was "contaminated" most probably by proto-Romanian (the Romanian that just emerged from Latin around VII century AD) and after some centuries has lost much of its declension system and replaced it by prepositions.
This may indicate a bilingualism of Romanians and Bulgarians for centuries in the Balkans (and linguistic assimilations from one side or another).


Today English is "a language without grammar" as some linguists are qualifying it, easy to be learnt by foreigners, while Old English had a specific Germanic declension system with, for example, specific endings for verbs at each person. This also reflects large numbers of non native English who have acquired English as secondary language and simplified it in a non conscious manner.


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## Stoggler

danielstan said:


> Today English is "a language without grammar" as some linguists are qualifying it



No serious linguist would ever state that English is a language without grammar.


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## Nino83

danielstan said:


> there were centuries (I BC, I-II century AD) when the number of Latin speakers increased by 100%, so half the Latin speakers were learning it from the other half (of which many families spoke Latin since 1 or 2 generations)
> The complexity of the Latin declension system was replaced by its (non native) speakers with almost 1 case declension and a lot of prepositions to express the case.


Hi Danielstan. 
The Latin declension system was lost in Rome (native speakers) but it was partially kept in Romanian (non native speakers).
As early as the second century BCE we find "de + ablative" in Plautus, Cato and Varro, "ad + accusative" in Plauto (source).


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> Sometimes things are not so simple. For example, in sentences like "They say that John doesn’t speak French, but *he* does" the subject pronoun is mandatory in  Czech,  Polish, *Finnish*, North Saami, Malayalam, Telugu (that have subject-verb agreement)



An incidental comment on Finnish's inclusion in this list: in the spoken language, the 3rd person singular verb form and the 3pl. verb form are not consistently distinguished (thus e.g. _se tekee _and _ne tekee_ mean "he does / they do"). This leaves the subject pronoun (singular _se_, plural _ne_) as the only means of disambiguating between singular and plural.

Although the inclusion of the 3rd person pronouns is also considered obligatory in the standard written language, where there is no such ambiguity (3sg. _hän tekee_, 3pl. _he tekevät_), it seems likely to me that the spoken language (which is probably more prominent in most people's day-to-day experience) exerts some influence on written conventions.

Also, there is an impersonal construction involving the 3sg. verb without an explicit subject, so the omission of a pronoun can affect the interpretation of a sentence even in a written context. Without an expressed subject, the 3sg. form _tekee_ could be interpreted to mean "one may do" or similar.

More generally, the "mandatoriness" of a given feature sometimes varies according to the individual speaker (or sample of speakers) you consult. For example, in colloquial English, subject pronouns are often dropped when the subject of a verb is contextually clear, but if you ask a speaker who isn't aware of his own usage patterns, or who prizes written standards over colloquialisms, you may come away thinking that explicit subjects are a requirement in English.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> in the spoken language, the 3rd person singular verb form and the 3pl. verb form are not consistently distinguished


In fact, the author uses the first person singular, for the Finnish example:


> Ne sanoo että (minä) en puhu ranskaa, mutta *(minä) puhun.
> they say that I not-1SG speak French but I speak-1SG
> ‘They say I do not speak French, but I do.’


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> For example, in colloquial English, subject pronouns are often dropped when the subject of a verb is contextually clear,





Dan2 said:


> - John never even finished high school.
> - Yes, but I've noticed that ___ speaks very well.
> note that
> a) the verb is unambiguously marked for 3rd person singular
> b) the context makes it 100% clear who the subject is
> c) other languages have no problem with subject-drop here ("che parla bene")
> And yet in English, *even in the most informal speech*, we simply must include "he".


from: Is English a pro-drop language?


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> In fact, the author uses the first person singular, for the Finnish example:



The example illustrates that you can omit the 1st person subject pronoun, which is to be expected, since the 1sg. verb ending -_n (puhu_*n*, etc._) _does not mark any other subject.



> Dan2 said: ↑
> - John never even finished high school.
> - Yes, but I've noticed that ___ speaks very well.
> note that
> a) the verb is unambiguously marked for 3rd person singular
> b) the context makes it 100% clear who the subject is
> c) other languages have no problem with subject-drop here ("che parla bene")
> And yet in English, *even in the most informal speech*, we simply must include "he".



I disagree with point "b": if you omit the subject pronoun, the sentence can be interpreted to mean "I have noticed that *that* [whatever "that" might refer to] speaks very well".


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> The example illustrates that you can omit the 1st person subject pronoun, which is to be expected, since the 1sg. verb ending -_n (puhu_*n*, etc._) _does not mark any other subject.


The asterisk before "minä" (*(minä)) indicates that the omission of the pronoun is considered wrong in Finnish, in this sentence.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> The asterisk before "minä" (*(minä)) indicates that the omission of the pronoun is considered wrong in Finnish.



My mistake. I am still a bit skeptical that the subject pronoun cannot be left out in that sort of context -- e.g. it sounds fine to me to say _puhun_ without the pronoun but followed by an adverb indicating how well the person speaks. But I will give the author of that paper the benefit of the doubt until I have consulted with native speakers.


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## danielstan

I learnt few Arabic words and expressions from an Iraqi colleague in faculty.
I was surprised to learn Arabic has 2 forms for the 2nd person pronoun ("you"): feminine _enti_ / masculine _ente_.
While all my life I learnt languages with a single form for "you", this dual form was something that conceptually I cannot understand:
- Why one needs to address to a lady with "_enti_" in Arabic, if he knows to whom is speaking?

On this side Arabic has a lot of precision (wisdom?), but Arabic misses the "to be" verb in sentences like:
- _Menu enti_? ("- Who (are) you?" / feminine)

It is definitely the hazard that governs the evolution of a language, because there is no reasonable explanation for such mixture of precision/imprecision in the same language.

P.S.
I spelled phonetically the Iraqi Arabic I heard from my friend. Excuse me if my spelling is wrong.


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## Karton Realista

Nino83 said:


> For example, in sentences like "They say that John doesn’t speak French, but *he* does" the subject pronoun is mandatory in Czech, Polish, Finnish, North Saami, Malayalam, Telugu (that have subject-verb agreement),


No. In Polish we don't use verbs to do, to be, can, will, etc. in a special way, so constructions that make perfect sense with them in English don't make any sense in Polish.
Even if you use the other verb from the sentence it's still unidiomatic: "Mawia się, że John nie mówi po francusku, ale on mówi" sounds clumsy and google-translated.
The correct sentence would be finished with ", ale to nieprawda" (but that's not true).


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## Hulalessar

Villeggiatura said:


> Could we discuss the wisdom of having and not having a grammatical feature (case/number/etc.)?



Every language should be considered as it comes in terms of what it can and must express and not in comparison with another language.


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## Gavril

Gavril said:


> My mistake. I am still a bit skeptical that the subject pronoun cannot be left out in that sort of context -- e.g. it sounds fine to me to say _puhun_ without the pronoun but followed by an adverb indicating how well the person speaks. But I will give the author of that paper the benefit of the doubt until I have consulted with native speakers.



I asked native Finnish speakers about this (using example sentences conforming to the same pattern as the original example), and the answers given so far do not support the idea that subject pronouns are obligatory in this context.

There does seem to be a tendency for the verb in this context to be paired with emphatic words (like _kyllä_ "yes, indeed") or focal enclitics (like -_pa_ or -_han_); subject pronouns are one possible example of the former.


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## Nino83

Karton Realista said:


> No.





Gavril said:


> do not support the idea that subject pronouns are obligatory in this context.


It means that Mr Homberg was wrong. 
I'm surprised that some linguists base their works on false premises in order to prove their theories.


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## Gavril

The Finnish example sentence in that paper was unusual, in that it contains the colloquialism _ne sanoo_ "they say" (this would be_ he sanovat_ in the standard language) mixed in with the 1sg. pronoun _minä_, which to my knowledge is only found in standard language (the colloquial equivalent being _mä_).


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## Nino83

Thank you, Gavril. 
I'll test the European Portuguese sentence too, because it seems really strange to me that some people in Portugal would find the sentence without any subject pronoun unacceptable.


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## Karton Realista

Nino83 said:


> It means that Mr Homberg was wrong.
> I'm surprised that some linguists base their works on false premises in order to prove their theories.


If you change the sentence a little bit you can create a verbal construct there, but it still doesn't require the pronoun.
"Mawia się, że John nie mówi po francusku, ale w rzeczywistości posługuje się nim doskonale" (but in reality he uses it perfectly). If you use the pronoun here the order would be reverse of a normal sentence's: ale posługuje się on tym językiem doskonale. (but he uses that language perfectly). Order VSO instead of SVO.


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## Nino83

My impression was confirmed in the Portuguese forum. In European Portuguese the most common sentence doesn't have any subject pronoun. 
Now I think that that paper is very very poor... 


Karton Realista said:


> but it still doesn't require the pronoun.


Thanks, Karton Realista.  


Gavril said:


> I disagree with point "b": if you omit the subject pronoun, the sentence can be interpreted to mean "I have noticed that *that [whatever "that" might refer to]* speaks very well".


I haven't got this point. 
There are two persons. The first one speaks about John. The listener replies, saying that John speaks very well (even though he never even finished high school). 
speaker A: John never even finished high school.
speaker B: Yes, but I've noticed that ___ speaks very well. 
In this case the context is very clear and in other languages subject pronouns are not necessary in these cases.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> In this case the context is very clear



No, it isn't. If I heard the sentence, "I have noticed that speaks very well", I would interpret the pronoun "that" as the subject of the relative clause (even if it wasn't immediately clear what this pronoun referred to). In English, _that_ can be either a demonstrative/anaphoric pronoun or a relative pronoun.

By contrast, in Italian (and all other Romance languages I know about), the relative pronoun (_che_/_que_/etc.) is formally distinct from the demonstrative (_quello_/_aquel_/_ese_/etc.)


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> I would interpret the pronoun "that" as the subject of the relative clause


And if we change the verb and omit the conjunction "that"? 
speaker A: John never even finished high school.
speaker B: Yes, but I know speaks very well.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> And if we change the verb and omit the conjunction "that"?
> speaker A: John never even finished high school.
> speaker B: Yes, but I know speaks very well.



That does not sound like normal English. If someone said that, most English speakers would probably not be able to identify "John" as the subject of "speaks" (at least not right away).

However, that only goes to show that the subject of "speaks" is not clear from the context of the sentence, and therefore the verb needs an expressed subject.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> However, that only goes to show that the subject of "speaks" is not clear from the context of the sentence, and therefore the verb needs an expressed subject.


Maybe it's context what makes null-subject languages different from non-pro-drop ones, with the former requiring very little context and the latter requiring too much context. Then, only in rare cases subject pronouns can be dropped.
Leaving aside east and southeast Asian languages (that have no subject-verb agreement and pro-drop), let's make some example in Italian:
Q: _Dov'è Gianni?_ A: _Credo che sia a casa_. => _sia = 1/2/3 sg. present subjunctive_, the pronoun _lui_ is generally omitted, even though the verb conjugation is ambiguous. This is possible because, seeing the context, it's clear that we're speaking of Gianni.
When starting a conversation: _Penso che *tu* debba venire al lavoro domani_. (I think *you* should come at work tomorrow). In This case there is no sufficient context, so _debba_ can mean _I/you/he/she should come at work_. In colloquial Italian, in order to drop the subject pronoun, we use present indicative, _Penso che *devi* venire al lavoro domani_.
Now in English:
Q: _Where is John?_ A: _I think *he*'s at home_. Do English speakers omit the subject pronoun in these cases?
Let's recall that in the Italian sentence the subject pronoun is omitted even though the verb conjugation is ambiguous, while in the English counterpart there is a clear third person singular.

Another one:
_Oggi Gianni non va a scuola perché sta male_.
_Today John isn't going to school because *he*'s ill_.


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## Dan2

Dan2 said:


> In the dialog,
> - John never even finished high school.
> - Yes, but I've noticed that ___ speaks very well.
> note that
> a) the verb is unambiguously marked for 3rd person singular
> b) the context makes it 100% clear who the subject is
> c) other languages have no problem with subject-drop here ("che parla bene")
> And yet in English, even in the most informal speech, we simply must include "he".





Gavril said:


> I disagree with point "b": if you omit the subject pronoun, the sentence can be interpreted to mean "I have noticed that *that* [whatever "that" might refer to] speaks very well".


True, but totally irrelevant, as Nino has been trying to argue.  In my sentence "that" is a conjunction (optional; could have been left out) and my point is that the sentence is ungrammatical without a subject for "speaks".  One would expect "he", but another possibility is to view that sentence as having NO conjunction word and interpret "that" as the subject of "speaks".  But that only supports the point I'm making, which is that you need SOME subject, be it "he", "that" (pronoun), "John", or whatever.


Nino83 said:


> And if we change the verb and omit the conjunction "that"?
> speaker A: John never even finished high school.
> speaker B: Yes, but I know speaks very well.





Gavril said:


> That does not sound like normal English.


Exactly - that's the point.  The sentence is ungrammatical without a pronoun, unlike Italian, where the pronoun is not needed.


Gavril said:


> If someone said that, most English speakers would probably not be able to identify "John" as the subject of "speaks"


Right, because unlike Italian, etc., we don't do subject-drop in embedded clauses - that's the whole point!

Again, in the earlier thread someone claimed English can do subject-drop whenever the subject would be derivable from context.  My point was that the subject is equally obvious in

- John never finished high school.
- ___ Speaks like a professor though! (Fine in colloquial speech)

and

- John never finished high school.
- Note (that) ____ speaks like a professor though! (Bad in all styles)

Conclusion: there are grammatical rules governing where subject-drop is possible in (colloquial) English.  It is NOT simply a matter of whether the context supplies enough information to identify the subject.


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## Nino83

Dan2 said:


> we don't do subject-drop in embedded clauses


With "embedded clauses" do you mean all dependent clauses, adverbial ones included?
For example: _Today John isn't going to school because *he*'s ill_.


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## Dan2

Right, subject-drop certainly isn't possible in your example:
_Today John isn't going to school because ___ is ill. 
On Fridays John doesn't go school because ___ has a job. _
I'd have to give some thought to what the exact condition is.  Seems to mostly occur in absolute sentence-initial position.


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## Dib

Nino83 said:


> ... in sentences like "They say that John doesn’t speak French, but *he* does" the subject pronoun is mandatory in  Czech,  Polish, Finnish, North Saami, *Malayalam*, Telugu (that have subject-verb agreement), ...



Could someone please comment on whether Malayalam really has subject-verb agreement? As far as I know, it doesn't.


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## Nino83

Dib said:


> As far as I know, it doesn't


My fault, you're right.


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## Gavril

Dan2 said:


> True, but totally irrelevant, as Nino has been trying to argue.  In my sentence "that" is a conjunction (optional; could have been left out) and my point is that the sentence is ungrammatical without a subject for "speaks".



I'm not convinced that there is such a thing as "grammaticality" in the way you seem to be using the term here. The question is whether the sentence is readily semantically intelligible: the pronoun wouldn't be necessary if the sentence really were intelligible without it, but I don't think it is.

If I heard the sentence "I've noticed speaks very well" for the first time, pronounced at normal speed, I think these are the first interpretations that would occur to me (granted, I already know what you are trying to say, so I am not an unbiased sample):

- "I've noticed a plural item called 'speaks', and I've done so very well"

- "I've noticed something called 'speaks very well'" ['speaks very well' sounds like a score you might receive on a test, similar to 'needs work']

The interpretation that "John" is the subject of "speaks" would probably come after these, if at all, because it would not coincide with any pattern that I am used to seeing. If I were to hear more sentences like "I've noticed speaks very well", where I understood that a subject had been omitted, then I would get more accustomed to them, and the interpretation of "John" as the subject would probably start to take precedence over the two listed above.

As for the question of why I don't already hear sentences like this, i.e. why they are not more common in speech, my guess is that it has to do with the following factors:

1) pro-drop, while possible in English, is not a hugely common process in English due to the lack of morphological subject marking on verbs (apart from 3sg. present -_s_)

2) therefore, pro-drop tends to occur in well-marked contexts, such as the beginnings of sentences ("Had a stressful day at work today"), or more generally when resuming after a pause ("Have you noticed ... speaks very well?") and is less likely to occur in contexts like the beginning of a subordinate clause ("I've noticed (he) speaks very well"), which is usually not separated by a pause from the main clause.

None of this means that a speaker couldn't start using pro-drop in less marked contexts, and that this trend could not spread through large portions of the English-speaking world. It just hasn't happened yet, and it is probably less likely to happen in English than in languages with more complete subject marking on verbs.



Dan2 said:


> Gavril said: ↑
> That does not sound like normal English.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Exactly - that's the point. The sentence is ungrammatical without a pronoun, unlike Italian, where the pronoun is not needed.
Click to expand...


"normal" (i.e. "commonly-heard") is not the same thing as "grammatical", which (as I understand the term) means that something conforms to an abstract template that has nothing (necessarily) to do with intelligibility.


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## Dan2

Gavril said:


> I don't accept that there is such a thing as "grammaticality" in the way you seem to be using the term here. The question is whether the sentence is readily semantically intelligible


OK, so for you "I don't speak English" and "Me no speak English" fall into the same category (since both are "readily semantically intelligible"), and nothing interesting distinguishes them.  Similarly, "The subjunctive adjective exploded in the non-existent closet" and "Adjective subjunctive the closet exploded in the non-existent" fall into the same category (since neither is semantically intelligible), and nothing interesting distinguishes them.

I don't believe that that's the kind of categorization people have in mind when they talk about the acceptability of subject-drop in various languages (or most other syntactic phenomena).


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## Gavril

Dan2 said:


> OK, so for you "I don't speak English" and "Me no speak English" fall into the same category (since both are "readily semantically intelligible")



The fact that you put "readily semantically intelligible" in quotes shows that the second is not readily intelligible in the way that the first is.

Many/most English speakers are familiar with "Me no speak English" as a parody of the way outsiders talk: to them, it is intelligible as a jesting equivalent of "I don't speak English". If someone completely unaware of this stereotype heard "Me no speak English", then I would expect him to have difficulty understanding it.

When I said I am not convinced "grammaticality" exists, I didn't mean grammaticality in the sense of 1) learned habits that guide one's understanding of language, or 2) consciously-prescribed rules that (for better or worse) supplement these habits. I meant mental "rules" that are not prescribed, and that cause words/phrases to be pronounced as "acceptable"/"unacceptable" irrespective of their intelligibility.



> Similarly, "The subjunctive adjective exploded in the non-existent closet" and "Adjective subjunctive the closet exploded in the non-existent" fall into the same category (since neither is semantically intelligible), and nothing interesting distinguishes them.



Both are non-intelligible utterances, one of which is more formally similar (in some ways) to certain intelligible utterances than the other.


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## Dan2

Gavril said:


> The fact that you put "readily semantically intelligible" in quotes shows that the second is not readily intelligible in the way that the first is.


I put it in quotes ONLY because I wanted to make it clear that I was quoting your exact words.  And I think it IS readily intelligible.


Gavril said:


> If someone completely unaware of this stereotype heard "Me no speak English", then I would expect him to have difficulty understanding it.


"Them no have money", which I've never heard and just made up, is equally understandable.  Or "I live here with wife already six years".


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## Gavril

Dan2 said:


> I put it in quotes ONLY because I wanted to make it clear that I was quoting your exact words.  And I think it IS readily intelligible.
> 
> "Them no have money", which I've never heard and just made up, is equally understandable.



It conforms to the same pattern as "Me no speak English": object pronoun = subject pronoun, _no_ = _not_, etc. Once you are familiar enough with the "jesting" register that these sentences are written in, you have a basis for understanding new sentences in that register. And I would imagine that a great deal of English speakers are reasonably familiar with it, by the time they reach adulthood.



> Or "I live here with wife already six years".



The sentence seems to be modeled after a foreign language like Spanish (where _ya _means "already" and "now"). If you had no familiarity with such languages (note, familiarity does not necessarily = fluency), would you have had the tools to produce or understand this sentence?


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## Dib

Gavril said:


> [...] I didn't mean grammaticality in the sense of 1) learned habits that guide one's understanding of language [...]. I meant mental "rules" that are not prescribed, and that cause words/phrases to be pronounced as "acceptable"/"unacceptable" irrespective of their intelligibility.



Could you, please, elaborate a bit what difference you are making between the two - learned habits and mental rules?


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> 1) pro-drop, while possible in English, is not a hugely common process in English *due to the lack of morphological subject marking on verbs* (apart from 3sg. present -_s_)



I find Dan2's "embedded clause constraint" very interesting.
For example there is a similar constraint in Icelandic.
Past indicative of the verb _sjá_ (to see): ég sá, þú sást, hann sá, við sáum, þið sáuð, þeir sáu.
José sabe que viu María.
Jón veit að *(hann) sá Maríu.
source: The Syntax of Icelandic, Höskuldur Thráinsson, Cambridge University Press (page 475)


> In Icelandic the personal pronoun _hann_ 'he' would be necessary in the embedded clause to get the intended reading.


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## Gavril

Dib said:


> Could you, please, elaborate a bit what difference you are making between the two - learned habits and mental rules?



Abstract mental rules (in the sense I am talking about) evaluate language on purely formal criteria, so that a given word/phrase/sentence could be semantically clear but "poorly formed", or semantically meaningless but "well-formed". Thus far I am not convinced that either of these is possible, except in a framework of intentionally prescribed rules.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> I find Dan2's "embedded clause constraint" very interesting.
> For example there is a similar constraint in Icelandic.
> Past indicative of the verb _sjá_ (to see): ég sá, þú sást, hann sá, við sáum, þið sáuð, þeir sáu.



Note that the 1sg. and 3sg. forms are identical, and the subject pronoun can therefore have a disambiguating role.

In the present indicative, the 2sg. and 3sg. forms have generally fallen together (_þú sér_ "you see", _hann sér_ "he sees"), the 1sg. is endingless (_ég sé _"I see") -- and can thus be confused with a noun/adverb/etc. if there is no pronoun next to it -- and the 3pl. is formally identical to the infinitive (_þeir sjá_ "they see", _sjá_ "to see").

The only forms with distinctive and unambiguous personal endings in all tenses/moods are the 1pl. (-_um_) and 2pl. (-_ið/-uð_), which I suspect are the most rarely used of the six persons.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> Note that the 1sg. and 3sg. forms are identical, and the subject pronoun can therefore have a disambiguating role.


In Old Norse (or Old Icelandic) it was possible to omit subject pronouns also in embedded clauses, even if the verb conjugation was ambiguous.
Past indicative of the verb _koma_ (to come): *kom*, komt, *kom*, kómum, kómuð, kómu
þegar þar kom, þá stóðu herramenn [...] um allan slotsgarðinn
‘When *he* came there, there stood noblemen all around the courtyard.’
(1661.INDIAFARI.BIO-TRA,66.1096)
Source: Null subjects in early Icelandic, Kari Kinn, Kristian A. Rusten & George Walkden, University of Oslo, University of Bergen, University of Manchester.  

If the subject is clear from context, in Italian the subject pronoun can be dropped also when the verb conjugation is ambiguous (present subjunctive, examples in #24)


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## Gavril

I am not saying that ambiguity of personal endings precludes pro-drop, just that it makes pro-drop less likely to occur than in languages where there is less such ambiguity. It is more likely to occur in Icelandic than in English, and more likely to occur in the Romance languages that have kept their final syllables (Italian _vengo_, _vieni_, _viene_, etc.) than in Icelandic.

I don't know what caused the incidence of pro-drop to decrease in modern Icelandic, but what may have happened is that tendencies that had long been colloquially present (shaped by the kind of ambiguities I mentioned in the last post) finally started to "surface" in the written language.


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> I am not saying that ambiguity of personal endings precludes pro-drop, just that it makes pro-drop less likely to occur than in languages where there is less such ambiguity.


Ok.
But why is pro-drop common at the beginning of an independent clause while it is not possible in dependent clauses?
Past tense of _vakna_ (to wake up): *ég vaknaði*, þú vaknaðir, *hann vaknaði* ,við vöknuðum, þið vöknuðuð, þeir vöknuðu
note: "e" means "dropped pronoun".


> Empty 1st person subjects in postcard, diary and telegram (or SMS?) style:
> a. *Ég/e* vaknaði snemma. *Ég/e* rakaði mig og . . .
> ‘Woke up early. Shaved and . . .’
> the singular forms vaknaði and rakaði in the a-example are morphologically ambiguous, that is, they could be 1sg. or 3sg. forms. Nevertheless, elliptical constructions of this kind can only be understood as having non-overt 1st person subjects, just as their counterparts in English, for instance.


Source: The Syntax of Icelandic, Höskuldur Thráinsson, Cambridge University Press (page 477)
It seems that there is such a constraint.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> Ok.
> But why is pro-drop common at the beginning of an independent clause and is not possible in dependent clauses?



At the beginning of a clause, there is no immediately preceding word that could be mistaken for the subject (or other complement) of a subjectless verb. This is generally not true of subordinate clauses.

Also, I wouldn't use the characterization "not possible" here: I would say "less likely to occur or develop (than at the beginning of independent clauses)".


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## Nino83

Gavril said:


> At the beginning of a clause, there is no *immediately preceding word that could be mistaken for the subject* (or other complement) of a subjectless verb.


In adverbial subordinate clauses the adverb (or conjunction) cannot be mistaken for the subject.


Dan2 said:


> Today John isn't going to school because ___ is ill.


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## Gavril

Nino83 said:


> In adverbial subordinate clauses the adverb cannot be mistaken for the subject.



It definitely sounds less ambiguous to drop a subject pronoun after "because" than after the relative pronoun "that", or a verb like "notice"/"know"/etc.

However, it is still possible to be at least temporarily confused by the sequence "because is":

_Today John isn't going to school because is ill_ --> "Today John isn't going to school; someone/something called 'because' is ill"

Even if most people would quickly realize this interpretation was wrong, it could still take more time/effort to arrive at the correct interpretation than it would if there were a subject pronoun after "because".

But again, if pro-drop were popularized further in English, then we could have a situation where there is no perceptible difference (in processing time) between "because is" and "because he is".


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## Dan2

Whenever someone produces an environment in which (under the traditional description) subject-drop is not possible, you say "because it would be hard to interpret".  But that is totally ad-hoc:  "So che ___ parla bene" is good?  "Italians can semantically interpret that."  "I know that speaks well" and "I know speaks well" are bad? "We can't interpret them properly".

There is nothing this approach can fail to "explain", since you accept the most outlandish possibilities as "explanations".  "He didn't go to school because is ill" is bad, you tell us, because we might interpret the sentence as


Gavril said:


> someone/something called 'because' is ill


(Somehow, Italians are not bothered by the possibility that someone/something called 'perché' might be ill.)

Looking at another phenomenon may help clarify things.  In English we say "He loves her"; any other order of the three words is not possible (except possibly for the marginal "Her, he loves").  Why do we say "He loves her"?  The standard description is that English is a language with SVO word order.  That's a simple claim with great explanatory power, and needs to make no reference to semantics.  But you see things differently:


Gavril said:


> I'm not convinced that there is such a thing as "grammaticality" in the way you seem to be using the term here. The question is whether the sentence is readily semantically intelligible


So "Loves her he", "He her loves", "Loves he her", etc., are unacceptable to native speakers because they're not "readily semantically intelligible".  This is an "theory" that can trivially explain every sentence that NS's find unacceptable and thus has no explanatory value.  How could you possibly falsify it?

On the other hand, if I say that English and German are SVO languages (_He loves her, Er liebt sie_) I'm making a claim that meets the standard scientific requirement of being falsifiable.  It seems to work well for English.  But a German will tell me, "Yes, _Er liebt sie_ is OK, but I don't like _Ich weiß, dass er liebt sie_; we need to say _Ich weiß, dass er sie liebt_ (SOV order).  My hypothesis "German is SVO" has to be abandoned or modified.  For you the good sentences are good because they are "readily semantically intelligible" and the bad ones are bad because they're not.  You can never be wrong.


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## Dib

Gavril said:


> Abstract mental rules (in the sense I am talking about) evaluate language on purely formal criteria, so that a given word/phrase/sentence could be semantically clear but "poorly formed", or semantically meaningless but "well-formed".



Fair enough, but what do you mean by "learned habits", then? I mean, aren't the so-called "habits" just surface realization of some mental rules, which have been formed as a part of language learning/acquisition? Probably it will help if you give some examples of both - learned habits and mental rules.


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## Gavril

Dan2 said:


> Whenever someone produces an environment in which (under the traditional description) subject-drop is not possible, you say "because it would be hard to interpret".  But that is totally ad-hoc:  "So che ___ parla bene" is good?  "Italians can semantically interpret that."  "I know that speaks well" and "I know speaks well" are bad? "We can't interpret them properly".



My contention is that:

1) Italian speakers are able to interpret that sentence without a subject pronoun because they have a history (from a very young age) of seeing pro-drop used in sentences.

2) This, in turn, is because pro-drop developed long ago in the history of Italian (or perhaps more accurately, an explicit subject requirement never developed)

3) This, in turn, is at least partly because Italian verb endings remain distinct for most/all persons, at least in the indicative -- thus Italian is better suited to the development or maintenance of pro-drop as a feature than languages with no verbal endings or with heavy ambiguity in their verb endings

This kind of explanation is potentially falsifiable: a potential counterexample is the case (mentioned earlier in the thread) of early Icelandic -> 20th Century Icelandic, where the written record shows a sudden loss of general pro-drop without any corresponding loss of verbal marking.

However, investigating the spread/decline of a phenomenon like pro-drop can be difficult because of potential discrepancies between writing (which seems more susceptible to prescriptivism and conservatism) and speech. Further investigation of the Icelandic case might show that pro-drop had been on the wane for a long time before this in actual speech, and that in the last century these tendencies finally broke through to the standard written language.

"falsifiability" does not necessarily = "instant or easy falsifiability"



> There is nothing this approach can fail to "explain", since you accept the most outlandish possibilities as "explanations".



I think my explanations are better than outlandish. You may consider the above interpretation of "because is" to be impossible (i.e. something that would never interfere with sentence processing), but you can't assume that everyone else shares this intuition.



> For you the good sentences are good because they are "readily semantically intelligible" and the bad ones are bad because they're not.  You can never be wrong.



Here is an experiment that might be able to falsify my idea:

1) show speakers a large sample of "poorly-formed but meaningful" words/sentences, such as "He couldn't go to work because is ill"

2) ask them to explain (or perhaps draw a picture of) what they understood from these examples

3) show a different group of speakers the "well-formed" equivalents of the words/sentences in #1, and ask them to re-state, or depict in drawing, what they understood from these examples

If there is no perceptible difference in the reaction times of the two groups, then this would support the idea (contrary to what I've been saying) that intelligibility is separate from well-formedness.

A problem that occurs to me is that the "explanation" task in #2 and the "re-stating" task in #3 aren't necessarily equivalent, but there might be a way around this.


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## Gavril

Dib said:


> Fair enough, but what do you mean by "learned habits", then? I mean, aren't the so-called "habits" just surface realization of some mental rules, which have been formed as a part of language learning/acquisition?



Habits are what you learn through the experience of using language (and seeing/hearing it used) to communicate.

For example, because of the communicative habits I've learned, I am unaccustomed to seeing the phrase “I'm” at the end of an utterance – so, if I heard the phrase “Hungry I'm”, I would not know (immediately) how to interpret it, though I could make some guesses.

Habits (as I'm using the term here) teach the speaker to evaluate language according to familiarity (i.e., “how does this resemble what I've seen/heard before?”) and intelligibility (“can I understand it?”), but not according to a third, abstract criterion of “well-formedness” of the kind I was talking about in post #37.


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## Dib

Gavril said:


> Habits are what you learn through the experience of using language (and seeing/hearing it used) to communicate.
> 
> For example, because of the communicative habits I've learned, I am unaccustomed to seeing the phrase “I'm” at the end of an utterance – so, if I heard the phrase “Hungry I'm”, I would not know (immediately) how to interpret it, though I could make some guesses.
> 
> Habits (as I'm using the term here) teach the speaker to evaluate language according to familiarity (i.e., “how does this resemble what I've seen/heard before?”) and intelligibility (“can I understand it?”), but not according to a third, abstract criterion of “well-formedness” of the kind I was talking about in post #37.





Gavril said:


> My contention is that:
> 
> 1) Italian speakers are able to interpret that sentence without a subject pronoun because they have a history (from a very young age) of seeing pro-drop used in sentences.
> 
> 2) This, in turn, is because pro-drop developed long ago in the history of Italian (or perhaps more accurately, an explicit subject requirement never developed)



Thank you, Gavril, for explaining your standpoint in detail. However, in my humble opinion, your and Dan2, etc.'s arguments are essentially the same in substance. You differ only in how you use certain terms, most notably "grammaticality" (and the concommitant underlying "mental grammar"/"mental rules"). The mental grammar (i.e. the collection of the mental rules) is understood to be formed - as the consensus definition goes among linguists - in children through exposure to ambient speech input. You just give it a different name - "learned (communicative) habits". Additionally, many linguists believe, the mental grammar is built on the foundation of an innate "universal grammar" (UG). Are you calling _this _the "mental grammar"? In any case, existence or absence of UG is irrelevant to understanding the concept of grammaticality, because grammaticality (as per the consensus definition among linguists) widely varies among languages (as seen here between English and Italian), and cannot obviously be the direct reflection of the UG alone, which - by definition - is supposed to be universal among all languages.


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## Gavril

Dib said:


> Thank you, Gavril, for explaining your standpoint in detail. However, in my humble opinion, your and Dan2, etc.'s arguments are essentially the same in substance.



Perhaps so, but it doesn't seem like it. Dan2 seems to be saying that there can be sentences that are semantically clear but "ungrammatical" (such as dependent clauses with pro-drop), and sentences that are semantically unintelligible but "grammatical". I dispute both of these.



> You differ only in how you use certain terms, most notably "grammaticality" (and the concommitant underlying "mental grammar"/"mental rules"). The mental grammar (i.e. the collection of the mental rules) is understood to be formed - as the consensus definition goes among linguists - in children through exposure to ambient speech input. You just give it a different name - "learned (communicative) habits".



This may not be relevant to your point, but I don't think the communicative habits I'm talking about have to be learned during childhood, and couldn't be learned by (e.g.) an adolescent or adult studying a second language.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> Perhaps so, but it doesn't seem like it. Dan2 seems to be saying that there can be sentences that are semantically clear but "ungrammatical" (such as dependent clauses with pro-drop), and sentences that are semantically unintelligible but "grammatical". I dispute both of these.



Whether an utterance is grammatical depends on whether it conforms to the rules which the speakers of the language follow. An utterance can be ungrammatical but still make sense: _Me no like her_ is perfectly intelligible. Whether an utterance which conveys no meaning can be grammatical depends on what you are talking about and what you mean by "grammatical". Whilst interesting, the subject deserves a thread of its own. What this thread is asking is whether some languages can be considered defective.

As to pro-drop, it comes down to what a language requires to be expressed and what it content to leave to context. Like whether a language has articles, a future tense or classifiers, it is all part and parcel of what the language is.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> Whether an utterance is grammatical depends on whether it conforms to the rules which the speakers of the language follow. An utterance can be ungrammatical but still make sense: _Me no like her_ is perfectly intelligible.



That sentence has no less of a claim to "grammaticality" (in a non-prescriptive sense) than the sentence_ I don't like her_. See my comments in #32 and #34.



> Whether an utterance which conveys no meaning can be grammatical depends on what you are talking about and what you mean by "grammatical". Whilst interesting, the subject deserves a thread of its own. What this thread is asking is whether some languages can be considered defective.



Agreed that this discussion (over the past 20 or so posts) has gotten a bit tangential and it may be time to wind it down.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> That sentence has no less of a claim to "grammaticality" (in a non-prescriptive sense) than the sentence_ I don't like her_. See my comments in #32 and #34.



I cannot quite agree that. We have to be able to say of an utterrance purporting to be in a given language (or variety of a language) whether it follows the rules of that language. If we cannot then I can insist that _Ubsko renk taljaklint_ is English. Descriptive does not mean anything goes. It is about recording what is found in different settings. What is found is grammatical in its setting, but not necessarily in another setting. _Me no like her _is not grammatical in any variety of English I am familiar with.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> Prescriptive does not mean anything goes.



Do you mean "descriptive"?



> It is about recording what is found in different settings.



Please define "found". Sentences following the pattern of "Me no like her" are found all over the place: as I explained earlier in the thread, they are part of a "jesting" register of English that a large percentage of English speakers are familiar with, to the point that they have no more difficulty comprehending it than they do "normal" English.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> Do you mean "descriptive"?



Indeed. Text corrected.




Gavril said:


> Please define "found". Sentences following the pattern of "Me no like her" are found all over the place: as I explained earlier in the thread, they are part of a "jesting" register of English that a large percentage of English speakers are familiar with, to the point that they have no more difficulty comprehending it than they do "normal" English.



By "found" I mean occurring in speech or writing. One does of course have to exclude deliberate error and jests. If, for example, a family has an au pair who uses some ungrammatical structure they may (hopefully when the au pair is not around) imitate it and carry on doing so after the au pair has left as an in-family joke. You cannot on that basis say it is grammatical.

Languages have sufficient scope so that they remain intelligible if when roughed up - which suggests that rather than being defective languages are over-supplied with unnecessary features. There are no "featureless" languages. Creoles, which might be expected to stay fairly simple, soon develop decorations. It seems that all languages need these extras, they just differ in what they are.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> One does of course have to exclude deliberate error and jests.



Why? The fact that jesting language often deviates (by design) from more familiar patterns does not make it "erroneous". It does not even preclude it from being used to convey serious messages in some situations: e.g. by now it is common for people to say "no can do" (= "I can't do it") in complete seriousness, even though its grammar is not clearly different from that of "Me no like it" (apart from the object pronoun).

As for "deliberate (linguistic) errors", I'm quite skeptical that this concept could exist in the first place without prescriptivism. Deliberate deviance (from more usual patterns) is one thing, deliberate errors (i.e. things that are "wrong" on abstract structural grounds) are another.


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## Hulalessar

It is not a question of whether jesting language is erroneous, but to what extent someone preparing a description of the language is to take it into account. When jesting, potentially anything goes. If anything goes a description becomes impossible. There comes a point where the investigator has to make a judgement. It is all very tricky as varieties and registers interfere with each other. As mentioned "No can do" is perfectly acceptable. However, a person uttering that in a serious situation (say a lawyer in a meeting negotiating a lease) is unlikely to say "Me no like this clause" and even less likely to say "Of clause this not is to me liking".

Allowing that language constantly changes and that certain constructions may be unstable and usage ephemeral, you have to be able to say whether or not an utterance conforms to the canons of the language under consideration.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> It is not a question of whether jesting language is erroneous, but to what extent someone preparing a description of the language is to take it into account. When jesting, potentially anything goes.



There might be some truth to that, but I don't think it is relevant to the point we're discussing.

The point is that there are certain well-established conventions within jesting speech, established enough that a large percentage (perhaps a good majority) of English speakers can readily understand them, and which sometimes extend into non-jesting contexts. Such conventions include the use of object pronouns as subject pronouns ("Me like ..."), the use of "no" to mean "not" ("Me no like ..."), the optionality of articles/determiners ("I live here with wife"), and so on.

If sentences created with these conventions are just as systematically intelligible (to many/most speakers) as their non-jesting equivalents, then I see no basis (other than prescriptive fiat) for declaring the former sentences "ungrammatical" in a way that the latter are not.



> As mentioned "No can do" is perfectly acceptable. However, a person uttering that in a serious situation (say a lawyer in a meeting negotiating a lease) is unlikely to say "Me no like this clause" and even less likely to say "Of clause this not is to me liking".



Likelihood is not the criterion we are talking about here, but rather intelligibility. "Me no like this clause" is easily intelligible to me and many other English speakers; "Of clause this not is to me liking" is probably far less clear to most speakers. In fact, if you hadn't prefaced it with a clearer equivalent, I'm not sure I would have fully understood it myself.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> If sentences created with these conventions are just as systematically intelligible (to many/most speakers) as their non-jesting equivalents, then I see no basis (other than prescriptive fiat) for declaring the former sentences "ungrammatical" in a way that the latter are not.



There may be a convention as to how to formulate "Pidgin English" but can it really be regarded as English (whatever variety we may have in mind)? It is no more than saying: "This is how some of us perceive or pretend some foreigners speak English".

If these conventions are to be regarded as grammatical what about when a non-native does his own thing but is intelligible? Are such utterances to be considered grammatical?


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## Dan2

Gavril is saying in effect that there is no phrase-structure grammar that produces the acceptable sentences of the language.  Rather, in his view, what is relevant is whether native speakers can correctly interpret a given string of words.  So I (and, I believe, Hulalessar) ask Gavril, is there really no difference between "I don't speak English" and "Me no speak English", or to use an example that hasn't (according to Gavril) been contaminated by our familiarity with a phrase (or phrase type) widely known as one used by non-native speakers, between "Yesterday I saw a cat chasing a dog through the yard" and "I see yesterday cat, cat chase dog, they go across yard".  In each case the second ("non-standard") sentence is as easily interpretable as the first sentence, so one has just as much justification in calling the second sentences "grammatical" or acceptable, according to the view expressed by Gavril.  He says:


Gavril said:


> I see no basis (other than prescriptive fiat) for declaring the former sentences "ungrammatical" in a way that the latter are not.


But it's clearly not (or at least not only) prescriptive fiat that allows one to distinguish between these two types of intelligible sentences: even native speakers who have no use for prescriptive rules, who have perhaps never even been _taught _prescriptive rules, who may not even be able to _read_, can easily distinguish between these two types of intelligible sentences.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> There may be a convention as to how to formulate "Pidgin English" but can it really be regarded as English (whatever variety we may have in mind)? It is no more than saying: "This is how some of us perceive or pretend some foreigners speak English".



The only meaningful definition of the term "English" that I currently accept, and that doesn't depend on prescriptivism, is:

the set of vocabulary, and associated morphosyntactic patterns, that are mutually (and consistently) understood by a particular group of people, most of whom currently live in Britain and its former territories, and not fully understood by people outside this group

It would be difficult if not impossible to identify every member of this group (especially in the current era of global travel and communication), but the group can at least theoretically be defined.



> If these conventions are to be regarded as grammatical what about when a non-native does his own thing but is intelligible? Are such utterances to be considered grammatical?



If the group of speakers mentioned in the above definition can consistently understand these utterances, I don't know why not.



Dan2 said:


> or to use an example that hasn't (according to Gavril) been contaminated by our familiarity with a phrase (or phrase type) widely known as one used by non-native speakers, between "Yesterday I saw a cat chasing a dog through the yard" and "I see yesterday cat, cat chase dog, they go across yard".



The structure of that sentence seems pretty familiar to me, and I imagine there are a good number of others for whom it is familiar (though some features might be recognized by fewer than would recognize e.g. "Me no understand").

A sentence whose structure is more novel (to me) would be "Of clause this not is to me liking", written by Hulalessar a few posts ago, and which I doubt I would have understood if it had not been preceded by a more intelligible equivalent.



> But it's clearly not (or at least not only) prescriptive fiat that allows one to distinguish between these two types of intelligible sentences: even native speakers who have no use for prescriptive rules, who have perhaps never even been _taught _prescriptive rules, who may not even be able to _read_, can easily distinguish between these two types of intelligible sentences.



Maybe, but the question is what "distinguish" means. The two different structures are usually associated with different social assumptions: e.g. speakers are often taught to associate the use of object pronouns as subjects ("Me want it") with silliness/humor.

Thus, a person who hears "Me left keys in car", will think of various things (e.g. "This person is trying to sound funny") that s/he would not think of on hearing "I have left the keys in the car".

This is not the same as having an untaught intuition for the "grammaticality" of one sentence and the "ungrammaticality" of the other.


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## Highland Thing

Gavril said:


> If sentences created with these conventions are just as systematically intelligible (to many/most speakers) as their non-jesting equivalents, then I see no basis (other than prescriptive fiat) for declaring the former sentences "ungrammatical" in a way that the latter are not.



Didn't you say you thought this thread ought to be wound down? All you seem to be doing is using your own personal definition of what constitutes grammaticality and disgregarding real linguistics. That's clear from what you say here: 'systematically intelligible' is NOT the same as 'grammatically acceptable' by any (DEscriptive) linguistic theory I've ever read about. A sentence has to be able to be generated from the grammatical rules of a perceived standard. The fact that everyone can understand 'me no like it' is neither here nor there, because there are no rules of any standard of English (pidgins and creoles excepted) that allow such expressions (object pronoun as subject etc) to be generated. That's all there is to say about it.


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## Gavril

Highland Thing said:


> Didn't you say you thought this thread ought to be wound down? All you seem to be doing is using your own personal definition of what constitutes grammaticality and disgregarding real linguistics. That's clear from what you say here: 'systematically intelligible' is NOT the same as 'grammatically acceptable' by any (DEscriptive) linguistic theory I've ever read about.



I'm not claiming they are the same: I am (implicitly) asking what evidence there is for the existence of "grammaticality" as a property, if familiarity and intelligibility are insufficient or irrelevant criteria.

I am not denying such evidence could be found (see the bottom part of post #47), I just don't think sentences that follow well-established and widely-used jesting conventions ("Me hungry", etc.) constitute evidence.


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## Nino83

Hulalessar said:


> What this thread is asking is whether some languages can be considered defective.


Exactly. Coming back to the thread, in my #2 I wanted to say that many different languages have a *different way* to express something.
Let's take four different languages: English (no case, pronouns excluded, almost no subject-verb agreement), Italian (no case, pronouns excluded, subject-verb agreement), Chinese (no case, no subject-verb agreement), Japanese (case, no subject-verb agreement).

Basic word order (in bold the sentence stress):
John read that *book*. SVO
John ha letto quel *libro*. SVO
John dú-le nà běn shū. SVO
John wa kono hon o yonda. SOV

If the focus (new information) is on the subject, for example after a question like "*who* read that book?" (who = focus, book = topic):
*John* read that book (SVO, stress shift); it was *John* who read the book (cleft sentence)
*John* ha letto quel libro (SVO, stress shift); quel libro l'ha letto *John* (OVS, "reprise pronoun", cleft sentence)
Nà běn shū (topic) John dú-le (OSV, TSV where T = topic)
Kono hon wa (topic) John ga (new information, focus) yonda (verb) (OSV, TSV where T = topic)

If the new information is "the book", for example, after a question like "*what* did John read?" (what = focus, John = topic):
John read that *book*. (SVO, stress at the end); that *book* John read (OSV, stress at the beginning)
John ha letto quel *libro*. (VO, stress at the end); quel *libro* ha letto John (OVS, stress at the beginning)
John dú-le nà běn shū. SVO
John wa kono hon o yonda. SOV

As you can see, in English and Italian (like in Slavic languages) the stress is on the focus. There are two ways to mark different element of the sentence, shifting the stress (from sentence final to sentence initial) and/or change word order.
In Japanese, that has case particles (topic included), they simply change the particle (wa = topic, o/ga = focus). There is a fixed Topic-Complements-Verb order, this means that when the new information (focus) is the subject, word order is OSV.
In Chinese, there are no case particles. The subject, in active sentences, must be placed before the verb, so we have SVO as basic word order and OSV when the new information (focus) is the subject.

We can say the same about Slavic languages. The prevalent (basic) word order (in sentences like John loves Mary) is SVO. When the new information (focus) is the object, word order is OVS (like in Italian, the stress shifts from the end to the beginning of the sentence).

In other words, different languages (with or without case or subject-verb agreement) have different ways to mark the different elements of the sentence, using different strategies (case/particle markers, word order, stress shift) but all these languages have a *basic*, *prevalent* word order and a *marked* word order.


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