I’m at the point in the semester where I’m knee deep in teaching syntax, which is good as it’s something I don’t often think about but feel that I should know better than I do. It does, however, have the additional effect of making me notice how my idiolect contains all sorts of examples of constructions that many people judge ungrammatical (most grievously, according to Walt, the dreaded resumptive pronoun).
So yesterday, I was with my sister at NYU’s lovely Bobst Library (now less scary with plexiglass barriers — photo of the amazing internal atrium here). Walt called, and wanted to meet up with us later at Old Town, but didn’t recall exactly where it was. So in the course of explaining to him how to get there, I said:
You know that street that the Union Square Petco is on the corner of Broadway and?
So apparently I can extract out of a coordinate construction. Now all I have to is come up with a naturally occurring subjacency violation (cause that’s the one that loads of papers about have been written) and I can just declare my own dialect.
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