But celebrating their religious observances in home and church is a clause with celebrating as its verb, not a noun phrase with observances as its head. The word celebrating cannot possible [sic] be an attributive modifier with observances, because their, a genitive pronoun, follows it; that cannot be anything but a determiner, and determiners precede attributive adjectives. (Genitive pronouns cannot serve as attributive modifiers: phrases like *the my house or *an our cat are utterly ungrammatical.)I also love that I found a typo. In Language Log.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
God, I love Language Log
"Nearly all strings of words are ungrammatical"!
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3 comments:
Just as I was typing "possibly" my cat jumped onto the desk and lunged for my left index finger, coming in from the right. I hit the keyboard three keys to the left, and the rest is history. But that typo is fixed now.
Language Log does not permit typos. ---Geoff Pullum
...SOMEONE FROM LANGUAGE LOG POSTED A COMMENT ON MY BLOG!I think I just had an orgasm.
And wow, Blogger decided to completely omit my carriage returns!
But this should be a lesson to all of you. Watch out for cats, and avoid carriage returns after ending a "strong" tag.
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