Teacher Discussion Forums

"You should visit the museum is very nice".

OK, I know the above sentence is grammatically incorrect, but lack the skills to give a simple explanation to a student about WHY. Do I say it's because there are two main points here about the museum and they need to be made separately?

Thanks.

The subject of "is very nice" should be only the museum, because that is what you are referring to. As it stands it appears to be saying the necessity of visiting museum is very nice.

You could add a comma (You should visist, the museum is very nice), which would mean that the city the museum is located in is worth visiting, on account of the nice museum at least. Then, you could also add 'it': (You should visit) the museum, it's very nice (topic-comment?) > The museum is very nice (Subject-Complement). Which all hopefully complements what woody was saying.

I am kind of into the grammar of speech, BTW. All the above is in the context of 'Places worth visiting in X': Hmm, the museum... . Adding 'nice' as a complement necessarily implies that one should visit it, that it is indeed worth visiting. A: Where should I visit? Any recommendations? B: Hmm, the Hamster museum's nice.

I think fluffy is on the right track. Students often use their own grammar to compose a thought and simply plug in words from the second language. If the student isn't trying to form the compound sentence You should visist, the museum is very nice. then they are probably attempting to form a complex one, You should visit the museum, which is very nice or The museum, which you should visit, is very nice.

Both of my example complex sentences contain non-restrictive relative clauses. I would stress to the student that this implies it is unecessary to combine them in a complex sentence. Two separate sentences work equally well. The museum is very nice. You should go there.

Ooh, hiya ouyang! You posted while I was editing/expanding a bit, I see!

I just thought I'd now add that lone writing/composition (which is what I assume the original "sentence" is a product of) has its own "share" of difficulties (as opposed to the demands made by participating in spoken dialogue in rapidly passing real time), but that in instances of error like this, spreading the emerging propositions between two partcipants might help make things clearer if not easier, and sound more natural (like I say, the modal can seem like overkill, even if it were a written reply to a request asking for recommendations, but doubtless some "should also's" do creep into lists: The museum is nice, and you can have dinner after in the restaurant opposite. You could then maybe pop by the red-light district (I recommend "Woody's" bar), and you should definitely end the evening with a moonlit stroll along Mugger's Lane (formerly Lover's Lane)).

Just remembered this (not really that connected initially/grammatically-speaking, but my reply there does have a range of exponents for 'Suggesting'):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=2771

My old linguistics professors would say that it's ungrammatical because the museum is allocated two theta roles, one from each verb.

Or you could say that a noun can't be a complement (here, of visit) and a subject (here, of is) simultaneously.

I can see the point of saying why sentences are ungrammatical as they stand (or were produced - unconsciously?), because one is learning general principles, but I sometimes wish that more linguists would definitely appear to take the next step and try to make things grammatical according to the standards of speech at least (like I said, one could for example just add a comma in writing, or a pause in speech, to the OP's sentence) - or does that occur to them, but they just don't have time to explicitly "enlarge" (or indeed dismiss) their sample and the scope of the "argument(s)"? But I suppose if they did that we'd end up just looking at grammatical and/or attested i.e. acceptable sentences and reduce linguistics to the taxonomic drudgery (not that creating a systematic taxonomy would be any mean feat) that Chomsky seemed so keen to avoid.

As for a noun playing two roles simultaneously, this seems possible in Chinese, but I suppose that a differing translation of the second verb in a 'pivotal construction' such as 'I have a friend (who) has nine children' (>I have a friend with nine children) would neaten things up a bit theoretically. Or I could just be talking out of my hat.

P.C. T'ung & D.E. Pollard, on page 46 of their [i]Colloquial Chinese[/i], wrote: Pivotal constructions
Consider these two sentences: 'Wo you yi wei pengyou xing Wang', and 'Tamen qing wo chi Fa guo cai'; making allowance for the fact that Chinese words are invariable in form, they match the English 'I have a friend named Wang' and 'They are inviting me to eat French food'. As such, they present no difficulty to English speakers. But the similarity may disguise the mechanism at work. In the Chinese the pivotal function of 'pengyou' and 'wo' can be discerned: 'pengyou' is cast as the object of 'you' in the first half, then faces round to be the subject of 'xing'; similarly, 'wo' is the object of 'qing' but the subject of 'chi'. English and Chinese part company when English resorts to a relative clause: 'I have a friend who has nine sons'; in Chinese the pivotal still serves: 'Wo you yi ge pengyou you jiu ge erzi'. Compare also 'Mei you ren bu xihuan chi Zhongguo cai', 'There is not a person (who) does not like to eat Chinese food'.

Oh, what the hell, I advised celinehoran in the linked thread (see my second post above) that '(?)You should visit. (Incomplete in this context of visiting London, not somebody's [only] home, and even the "home" context really needs something like 'us sometime' to complete it nicely)', so it would be a bit perverse if I pushed too hard here for the grammaticality of 'You should visit (-), the museum is very nice'. I still find it a bit strange though that linguists seem to strive to invent ungrammatical sentences whilst learners aim (should aim) more at producing "acceptable" language (language that will hopefully "pass the listener by" whilst getting the meaning across) than grammatical sentences, if their goal is to keep up with possibly sloppier natives in actual speech (I am not saying however that it should be the goal of teaching to not only study but actually encourage the copying of "disfluency" or "performance" - everyone likes to exactly express their propositions, nail them perfectly. But speech (the medium, and obviously the product) is not writing). It is like learners can never change a thought and "its" consequent expression in "mid-sentence", even though that is what native speakers do all the time (but then, at least the native's "worst" efforts will probably end up making enough sense, and like I said in a previous post above, if this is writing we're talking about, the learner really does have to become more accurate).

Anyway, I'd still be interested in hearing what you guys make of the Chinese data in relation to theta roles.

Anyway, I'd still be interested in hearing what you guys make of the Chinese data in relation to theta roles.

The memories I'm dredging up here are at least 15 years old, but IIRC examples like the Chinese one were usually dealt with by saying that there was a "non-overt" noun taking up one if the theta roles. So it's not I have a friend has nine children but I have a friend Ø has nine children, where Ø is a kind of "null" which fills the space on the tree diagram.

It always struck me as something of a get-out clause; I could never see how that theory could be tested.

lolwhites wrote:

Anyway, I'd still be interested in hearing what you guys make of the Chinese data in relation to theta roles.

The memories I'm dredging up here are at least 15 years old, but IIRC examples like the Chinese one were usually dealt with by saying that there was a "non-overt" noun taking up one if the theta roles. So it's not I have a friend has nine children but I have a friend Ø has nine children, where Ø is a kind of "null" which fills the space on the tree diagram.

It always struck me as something of a get-out clause; I could never see how that theory could be tested.

Well, I assume that Chinese like English can also go 'I have this friend(,) (and) he has nine kids' (Wo you yi ge pengyou, ta you jiu ge erzi), but that would be a matter for empirical investigation, and to say that Chinese "must" have a null pronoun or noun there (and is that a 'Null subject parameter' in pivotal constructions? ) when it can equally seem to do without one (unlike English, though see links below regarding a possible ellipsis in English) is I would agree perhaps stretching things a bit.

http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=7271
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 0877#30877

In a lot of languages you needn't state a subject, but obviously the idea of the subject is always there, thus you can imagine up a "null".

The explanation I gave works well enough for English, I guess, since you can't have null items confusing matters. I was going to add an example with "it" in the middle, but the OP is a native speaker after all..........

Interesting. Doesn't seem very relevant though.

Topic-prominence, it's part of the tapestry, and hinted at in the (our) above discussion.

In Spanish it could be first language interference.

Debes visitar el museo; és muy bonito.