Saturday, September 15, 2007

Geekman does linguistics

Geekman, looking over my shoulder at a worksheet on syntactic relations that asks students to give an example of a complement and an adjunct:

"A complement: 'You're so pretty!' An adjunct: 'You're so adjacent!"

2 comments:

  1. I once wrote an entire paper like this, but for some reason it was not accepted for credit. It was fun, though.

    It all started when a Noun Phrase offered a rather feisty Dynamic Verb a Prepositional Complement. She thought the future perfect had finally arrived. "We've been living in synonymy for years," she said. "It's about time we conjugated."

    ("Oh, absolutely," simpered a passing Modal.)


    ...and so on. Linguistics has all the best words.

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  2. Excellent. And that's before you even get to Chomsky's weird hang-ups. (Seriously, government, binding, domination, suicidal greed? Are these terms you'd expect an anarchist to use in his pet theory?)

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