Teacher Discussion Forums

so i`m doing a speculation lesson this week at
my little eikaiwa, and there are some fill-in-the-blank
examples to be completed with must/may/could/might.
a couple examples leave the possibility to make
a "I must have to do it" or "I must want to do it"
answers. i can't find any hardcopy ruling on it
but it sure seems wrong to me. can anybody school
me on any must+verb impossibilities?

gracias,
scot

You're getting into "logically impossibility" here vs. any sense of grammaticality.

But even these odd sentences in the right context are not only plausible but entirely suitable. "I must want to lose my job or I wouldn't keep showing up late for work."

Here's a small set of concordances for must+want from the Cobuild Corpus Concordance Sampler:

They must want the Pimple badly.
They must have more
They must want help themselves
you must want it to be permanent.
so someone must want to buy it.
But you must want to do it.
All rally drivers must want to win the world championship.
He must want to die, he's killing himself,
He must want something he ain't got.
you must want to come in the first place mustn't you.
They must want me. They must think I'm a good

"I must have to do it"

I think even abu will be hard pushed to find a context for this one.

"Hey, if my wife says I have to do it, I must have to do it!"

"If YOU have to file taxes, I must have to do it too!"

about how the ungrammaticalily of an utterance being no more than the difficulty of imagining a context for its use.

BTW, here's a nice example of an error that is less about "bad grammar" than it is about "sloppy cut 'n paste." The first part of this sentence ("about how the ungrammaticality of an utterance") gets crudely grafted onto the "being no more" chunk. This is by the way what is sometimes called a "pivot" in various approaches to discourse analysis and is quite common in conversational data.

Hmmm...very curiously my own post that I quoted this error from has disappeared from the thread.

I made reference to Brazil's 1995 "A Grammar of Speech" where he suggests that grammaticality judgements are just a function of how easily one can imagine a possible situated use. Even utterances with what would seem like blatant syntax errors ("He are too") can it fact be found in conversational data and be found to have been designed precisely this way to fit the local exigencies of the talk.

abufletcher wrote:I made reference to Brazil's 1995 "A Grammar of Speech" where he suggests that grammaticality judgements are just a function of how easily one can imagine a possible situated use. Even utterances with what would seem like blatant syntax errors ("He are too") can it fact be found in conversational data and be found to have been designed precisely this way to fit the local exigencies of the talk.

What do you mean by 'designed' (in relation to 'local exigencies'. Exigency: noun [C or U] FORMAL the difficulties of a situation, especially one which causes urgent demands (CALD online)). I'd have no problem with 'Rules will sometimes be broken, but are for the most part observed overall (that is, there is a consistency in the speech that causes one to observe, 'This is undeniably English that I'm looking at here, yes, typical of English grammar').

A lot's been posted today! I'll try to get back to you guys soon myself once I've had a bit more time to go through things.

fluffyhamster wrote:A lot's been posted today! I'll try to get back to you guys soon myself once I've had a bit more time to go through things.

Oops. I was thinking I was on the "Matrix" thread! Might link from there to here if the discussion takes off here too!

fluffyhamster wrote:What do you mean by 'designed'

I mean "designed" in the sense that the speaker wanted the turn to turn out just like it did, rather than having occurred as the result of a "production error" of some sort.

People regularly playfully manipulate the "regularities" of language for their own interactional purposes. But I'll be the first to admit that verb tenses seem to be the least amenable part of language to purposeful manipulation. And I think that is precisely why traditional language teaching spends so much time on things like the "tense system" and "word order" -- these are just the parts of language that best fit a preconceived notion of language (as machine).

You can go ahead and provide that link now!

Wilco again, Morpheus, babe.

abufletcher wrote:Hmmm...very curiously my own post that I quoted this error from has disappeared from the thread.

I made reference to Brazil's 1995 "A Grammar of Speech" where he suggests that grammaticality judgements are just a function of how easily one can imagine a possible situated use. Even utterances with what would seem like blatant syntax errors ("He are too") can it fact be found in conversational data and be found to have been designed precisely this way to fit the local exigencies of the talk.

Hmm maybe it didn't appear? I didn't delete anything except an exact duplication I saw.

It must have appeared because I quoted from it in a subsequent post!

Dare I say "I must have to do it differently next time?"

Dare I say "I must have to do it differently next time?"

If you don't mind being confused with one of your weaker students, go ahead.

If you do mind, then try
I'll have to do it differently next time
or
I'm going to have to do it differently next time.
or
I must do it differently next time

Dare I say "I must have to do it differently next time?"

If you don't mind being confused with one of your weaker students, go ahead.

If you do mind, then try
I'll have to do it differently next time
or
I'm going to have to do it differently next time.
or
I must do it differently next time