Fillanzea Wrote:It's an example in Wikipedia under Wh-movement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wh-movement

It's been a while since I had a class in syntax, it's hard for me to think up examples on the fly!

Thanks! I must have read that page before and forgotten about it!

Imabi Wrote:The sentences sound fine to me. Lol

I find that thinking too much about a sentence like this can make anyone a bit confused. Sometimes when foreign exchange students at my university ask me about the grammaticality of a Swedish sentence I really start doubting my opinions and second-guess myself. What would your opinion be, as a native speaker, if we compare the sentence above to the proposed correct version?

"What did you go home because you needed to do?"
"You went home because you needed to do what?"

Fillanzea Wrote:there are some grammatical constraints that seem to apply across all languages, and these things aren't arbitrary; they're based on the underlying phrase structure of the sentence.

couldn't they just be based on the underlying commonality of human communicative needs? For example, verbs may typically take a certain number of parameters (up to 3?) across languages because for most communication people only ever needed to describe relationships between a small number of things.

from what I've read of it, Chomsky based linguistics (universal grammar) seems like an enormous load of crap to me...

nadiatims Wrote:

Fillanzea Wrote:there are some grammatical constraints that seem to apply across all languages, and these things aren't arbitrary; they're based on the underlying phrase structure of the sentence.

couldn't they just be based on the underlying commonality of human communicative needs? For example, verbs may typically take a certain number of parameters (up to 3?) across languages because for most communication people only ever needed to describe relationships between a small number of things.

from what I've read of it, Chomsky based linguistics (universal grammar) seems like an enormous load of crap to me...

Note that some of Chomskys opinions are widely accepted by the majority of the linguistic community while some of his theories enjoy far less support! If I recally correctly, Chomsky advocates the discontinuity theory of how language came to be, and many linguists disagree with his views on that matter. On the other hand, it would be very hard to make a serious argument against what he has to say about syntax, statistical approximation and semantics and how the latter two are not connected to the first one.

nadiatims Wrote:

Fillanzea Wrote:there are some grammatical constraints that seem to apply across all languages, and these things aren't arbitrary; they're based on the underlying phrase structure of the sentence.

couldn't they just be based on the underlying commonality of human communicative needs? For example, verbs may typically take a certain number of parameters (up to 3?) across languages because for most communication people only ever needed to describe relationships between a small number of things.

from what I've read of it, Chomsky based linguistics (universal grammar) seems like an enormous load of crap to me...

It's certainly possible -- there are definitely some linguistic universals that can easily be explained by human communicative needs. It's not like I'm an expert in linguistics, and linguistics certainly doesn't have all the answers yet. I'm not trying to state a definitive argument, I'm just trying to bring up the other side.

With a comma after what, it would change the meaning of the sentence, but it would still be logical to me. I totally agree with you that you can start doubting your own knowledge of your native language when someone asks you something like that.