Re: Conjunctive Inversion
- From: Nathan Sanders <nsanders.DIE.SPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:33:40 GMT
In article <44046AE1.1F3E@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ron Hardin <rhhardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Nathan Sanders wrote:
In article <440444C7.1E97@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ron Hardin <rhhardin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's a little complicated by being a negative. Make it positive :
Do you know anything about English?
*You know anything about English?
Your second example sentence is grammatical, so I don't know why you
have a * in front of it.
It's grammatical as ellipsis
Ergo, it's grammatical.
Pick better examples to prove your point:
(1) He know anything about English?
(2) *He knows anything about English?
Although I don't know what the point of your example is in the context
of this thread, since the ungrammaticality of (1) (and of your related
sentence) is based on the requirements for licensing the negative
polarity item "anything", a word that isn't present in your original
sentence.
If you want to analyze the grammaticality of a sentence, don't rely on
completely different and unrelated sentences to prove your point.
Nathan
--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
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