| There was an implied "in isolation" on that sentence -- what's proper with other clauses and sentences included isn't necessarily alone. An English speaker used it as an example of a statement that would cause a parse error for most English speakers, and so it did. The speaker said it even caused such a reaction in them. I would argue that they weren't attempting to use English, but quasi-English in an attempt to communicate the boundaries of English to people who can parse English (which inherently has some ability to parse quasi-English). I don't think it's useful to pretend "English" is a coherent class of parsing rules (either over time or over population) -- there's only a roughly similar set of parsers undergoing continuous memetic evolution, broken up into subsets that are more similar. At the end of the day, English is as people who can parse some subset of it do -- and it might reach the point where it makes more sense to talk about English languages than an Enish language. That being said, your last paragraph confuses me: It's not obvious to me that we aren't restricted to a finite number of forms in language. It's not clear to me why you think semantics being higher order syntax requires that it only be capable of finitely many forms. (The rest of it seems dependent on those two conclusions.) |