I have noticed various marks in example sentences to denote incorrect examples of English:
This is correct.
*This incorrectly.
The former is left alone; the latter has an asterisk marking the sentence as a bad example ‐ something to avoid and not repeat.
Is this notation widely adopted? Are there other marks with similar purposes? I have also seen the following denoting a questionable case:
? This would have been maybe debated.
I am interested in the proper usage and formatting of these marks. How should they be spaced? Should they be placed before or after the sentence? If a particular word is in question, should that word get the mark or the entire sentence?
Answer
These are standard in linguistics works. I don't think they are widely used or understood by general readers.
(There are actually two different uses of '*', one marking utterances which would not occur, and the other marking historical words or forms which are reconstructed, not attested; but it is rare that this double use causes any confusion).
I would put the markers immediately before the sentence without a space:
*They wasn't coming
I would occasionally use them to mark an individual word, but normally only when different possibilities are being compared:
They weren't / *wasn't coming
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