Linguimericks—Book ८६—Academic Communication In Poetry II SpecGram Vol CXC, No 4 Contents Quipley’s Don’t Believe It! ... Or Do?

Grammaticality Brown Strikes Back

I been hearing that me old mate Claymore has been responding to my little seedlings on how to grow stuff in your linguistic soil. We all knows about clay soils and acidity, right? It’s like trying to plant Volapük into a bed of National Academies.

Anywho, someone else asked me about borrowings and whether you can just transplant, say, a French spring adjectival past participle, into a old Germanic oak. Well, if you like, you can, but let me tell you what happened when someone did that.

Old William was famous for his conkers. He even grew 1066 of them one time. He comes over with his mate Norman to plant some lovely French for a guy called Harold, who was famous for his arrow-mint. Well, old Harold starts getting all prescriptivist, and challenges William to a dual-form near hastily constructed compounds.

Long story short, there’s a big fight over universal grammar, Harold’s first person singular gets planted somewhere, and the whole field gets strewn with Saxon expletives and French loan words. It took a lot of time to rake all that up, I can tell you.

Suffix to say, no-one is silly enough to import stuff into English now. It’s been stuck as a weird hybrid ever since and ol’ Claymore is upset because my centre-embedded noun phrase beet his at the last conference. That’s because I use a good strong X-bar to support it.

LinguimericksBook ८६Academic Communication In Poetry II
Quipley’s Don’t Believe It! ... Or Do?
SpecGram Vol CXC, No 4 Contents