User:Kent Dominic/sandbox

By now I hope you recognize that my primary interest in linguistics is based on pragmatics, not scholarly interest. Practical speaking, linguistics can only go so far in accurately describing semantics. In other words, native speakers often are accustomed to phrases that make little syntactical sense as analyzed from a traditional linguistics perspective. So when I use a customary phrase in English and an L2 counterpart asks its meaning, I can always offer a synonym while failing to provide a satisfactory linguistic explanation. Case in point... In my novel, the character Deborah says to a cashier, "You won't believe who I bumped into earlier today." No English L1 speaker can assail that quoted text as sounding unnatural. But, is it grammatically correct? Traditionalists would insist that the subjective "who" must correctly be rendered as the objective "whom." As the novelist, I refuse to heed the traditional grammar for two reasons: As you should now know from my prior posts, each word in my novel includes hypertext with a pop-up definition and corresponding taxon that identifies its part of speech. accordingly, I've encoded the excerpt as follows: No dictionary anywhere offers a sense for "who" as defined above despite how L1 English speakers in the U.S. use the word in exactly the way represented above. Grammatical? Ungrammatical? I'm not an arbiter. I'm just a writer who employs colloquial dialogue and defines it in painstaking detail for the benefit of anyone who's interested. "You won't believe what I saw earlier today" is a simple sentence, by far.
 * 1) The character doesn't habitually speak in the formal register that traditionalists would prescribe.
 * 2) "You won't believe whom I bumped into earlier today" could be interpreted as, "You won't trust the veracity of the person (that) I bumped into earlier today," which is not the semantic meaning intended by the character. Instead, she means, "You won't guess the fact of whom it was (that) I bumped into earlier today."
 * You (pronoun) = a subject pronoun that corresponds to the cashier
 * won't (modal verb phrase) = a contraction of "will not"
 * believe (transitive verb; idiomatic) = aptly guess and trust the basis of an ensuing allegation relating to a name, occurrence, or person
 * who (pronoun) = what person
 * I (pronoun) = a subject pronoun that corresponds to Deborah
 * bumped into (past simple form of "bump into") = incidentally or unexpectedly encountered
 * earlier (adverb) = previously
 * today (adverb) = on this particular day

Why do I go to so much trouble? Five reasons: Of particular note: Indeed, as far as I can tell, "into" never comprises part of a phrasal verb but instead comprises hundreds of collocated verb phrases. And FYI, the term, "phrasal verb," was first coined in 1925. I don't know when "verb phrase" was coined. It seldom matters to me if anyone else conflates the two terms although I have edited some Wikipedia articles accordingly. I mainly just make it point not to make the same mistake myself.
 * 1) It's an ESL textbook, so it saves readers (and instructors) the need to look up unfamiliar vocabulary.
 * 2) It offers the taxons (which I consider to be lexical categories rather than parts of speech) for each lexical item, helping learners from a contextual standpoint.
 * 3) It's a separately-constituted textbook for L1 English composition, so it enables readers (and instructors) to see syntactical relations from a linguistic POV.
 * 4) It enables readers to see nuances that are typically missed in hard-copy text formats
 * 5) It's a personally rewarding vehicle for me to ensure that all of the narrative material accurately reflects the vocabulary that I intended as a novelist.
 * All of the definitions are original, and every sense for each glossary entry is individually hyperlinked to each unique instance of a word as used in the textbook.
 * My glossary entry has bump into as an intransitive verb phrase; the Oxford dictionary has it entered as a phrasal verb. "Who cares?" you wonder, "the meaning is the same!" The difference is this:
 * A phrasal verb renders "bumped into earlier today" as a transitive verb that acts on the grammatical object, "earlier today." You and I would never construe the excerpt that way, but bear in mind that lots of English L2 learners have an L1 perspective that - unlike English - restricts one lexical item to one lexical category. (E.g. "look over the report" versus look "over someone's shoulder" confounds those who don't know that "over" can be either an adverb or a preposition.)
 * The verb phrase renders "bumped into earlier today" as an intransitive verb that acts on an unaccusative basis. If you want, you can quibble that the "incidentally or unexpectedly encountered" pop-up definition seems transitive, but indeed it's not. The ULTRA traditional construct underlying the excerpted sentence is, "The person into whom I bumped is a fact that you won't believe" clearly shows the intransitivity of "bumped."