Re: Things not to put after a full stop.

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

I agree with everyone who has noted that the original poster's "rule" about not starting a sentence with this or that word is a canard. And I agree that composition textbooks are full of similar canards.

But that is not the same thing as saying there are _no_ rules. The difficulty arises because we use one word--grammar--to represent two entirely different, even orthogonal, concepts.

I highly recommend Steven Pinker's book, _Words and Rules,_ which clearly elucidates the modern linguistic concept of grammar pioneered by Noam Chomsky and explains in some detail what is meant by the word _rule_ in this context.

At the high level, though, let me put it this way. There is such a thing as a well-formed utterance, that is, one that is recognized by native speakers as being part of the language. And there is such a thing as an ill-formed utterance, one that is not recognized as being part of the language.

I don't mean to pick on Tom, because it is just a simple typo; but his last sentence in the passage Peter quotes is an example of a an utterance that most native speakers would call wrong. We can assign names to things and explain (pseudo-explain?) that the reason they would call it wrong is that the subject and verb do not agree in number. Or we can just just assign a negative weight to it in a pattern recognition system. Whether we say it violates a rule of copybook grammar or is simply an utterance that would not be produced by a generative grammar, we still know it's wrong.

So let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Otherwise, we'll all be out of a job and the developers and marketers will write the doc.

Dick

Peter <pnewman1 -at- optonline -dot- net> wrote:

>
>Tom Murrell wrote:
><snip> 
>> English is a very flexible language. No doubt the determined researcher will find
>> text supporting one or another (or several) rules of things one should not do in
>> English when writing. But the truth is that there are very few hard, fast rules, and
>> you can find sterling examples of English prose that violates the so-called rules.
>
>
>An interesting book supporting rule breaking is "Woe is I" by Patricia
>O'Conner
>-- 
>Peter
>


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