Does Steve Martin’s Mental Grammar Match Yours?
Wild and Crazy WTF « Literal-Minded
On the very first page, though, I found this strange passage:
…the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next.
How could a sentence that sounds so wrong have survived numerous rounds of revision and editing to end up in the final product?
Neil Whitman goes on to examine a number of possible ways that coordination might be licensed, but finds them wanting. This doesn’t strike me as particularly odd until it’s pointed out. I don’t think I’d produce such a sentence, except by cut-and-paste error, but I don’t notice it when I read it–and there are a lot of things I do notice that bug me when I read, so the fact that it passes muster until I stop to examine it says something to me. I suspect a production rule that merely requires coordination between the last w-word in the list and what follows. If you flipped it around "what and when to say next" it would sound strange, even to me, but could be repaired by fixing the right-hand coordination "deciding what and when to say something next." Maybe. It’s hard to return to the pristine state before the lack of coordination was pointed out and tell if it would have raised a flag.
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007