Missed It By THAT Much!

Tel Monks and
the SpecGram Puzzle Elves™

In at least one edition of Di Sciullo and Williams’ 1987 On the Definition of Word is the following sentence (p.13):

It is unclear whether some notion of paradigm will extend to the other cases of blocking, but it is worth nothing that even the core notion of inflectional paradigm cannot be restricted to words but must also include phrases.

This interesting misprint, nothing for presumed noting, serves as the inspiration for a little competition.

Your mission is to take one sentence from a well-known linguistic writer and make one change (add a letter, delete a letter, or transpose two letters) and let hilarity ensue. Here is an example from Syntactic Structures:

The grammar of L will thus be a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of L and nine of the ungrammatical ones.

And another based on Zeno Vendler’s oft-quoted Linguistics in Philosophy:

At this point, as it often happens in philosophy, we suddenly realize that the path of enquiry we hoped to open is already marred by the footprints of Aristotle.

If you think you’ve got what it takes to sin, send your entry (along with bibliographic information, and the original sentence) to SpecGram by January 15, 2011. The best entries will be printed in an upcoming issue of SpecGram, and at least one lucky winner will win a SpecGram fridge magnet.

	Linguistic Cocktails—The SpecGram Mixologists
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