1076: Understanding Ungrammaticality Nov 19, 2017

People are surprisingly good at understanding bad grammar, and perhaps equally good at determining when good grammar sounds bad. This is not to say that people will to innately follow prescriptive rules, but that, on the contrary, people can often make out a reasonable meanings that are not provided in the language, for instance if the sentence is worded in a confusing way, such as with double-negatives. Although these do not have to rely on 'not', no', and '-n't ', these are prevalent, as in sentences like "this is not to say that I don't think that it isn't [adjective]" which would have a negative meaning when parsed, but in conversation could easily be interpreted as positive, because it combines two commonly used double-negatives: "I don't think that it isn't" and "this is not to say that I don't think (that...)". For an example of this confusion in the real world click here. Often, as with 'me' after 'than', people get used to conventions and it may sound worse to be grammatical. On the other hand, Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" makes no sense, but it grammatical.