🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <SCHILLER.92Jul29190137@tira.uchicago.edu> schiller@tira.uchicago.edu (Eric Schiller) writes:
>Don't know what you mean. I checked the data with LOTS of native
>speakers, and I believe that Fowler did too. Maybe you should
>get together with Kartik and invent some normative Russian that
>no one speaks. Really, people do use the construction. it is
>not the invention of a linguist. As I noted in one of my
>posts, not ALL speakers accept it, but then that is not
>the point. 

Linguistics rule #1: Don't badger the native speaker. Especially not in public.

On the other hand, I apologized a bit too soon.  The example with three
datives was indeed my error, but the example with two is one that I also
have encountered and had native speakers accept -- this is the "nam bylo
pomoch' emu" (to-us was help to-you 'we had to help you') example.
Perhaps the problem is the use of a modal dative embedding a verb that
itself accepts dative -- some parsing problem?

So let us construct an example without that feature.

Mr. Zeleny, is "nam bylo poexat' tuda" `to-us was go there` also
impossible for you?  Do you also need 'nado' in there?

>A linguistic theory must at least account for
>all attested data (the old descriptive adequacy). This
>is data we syntacticians must wrestle with, as Fowler did
>in his dissertation.

Do you mean this the way it sounds?  I certainly hope "attested" doesn't
mean first and foremost "included in the examples section of a
linguistics dissertation".  Can I just go and make stuff up and you
promise to wrestle with it?  I am not at all implying that Fowler made
anything up -- indeed, his data coincides with my own experience of what
informants accept -- but a dissertation is not the ultimate authority on
facts.

And shouldn't that be "us syntacticians"?

-David Pesetsky