Sunday, March 1, 2015

punctuation - Syntax for marking incorrect examples of language



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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