Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 November 17

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November 17

grammatical antipattern used in advertising

What's exactly going on in the commonly used scheme of writing advertisements with a bunch of sentence fragments separated by periods as if they were real sentences? The current WMF fundraising banner is an example: "Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure." I don't really know any linguistic mumbo-jumbo, but I'm looking for an explanation like "those 'sentences' are interpreted as having an empty category where the verb and object are supposed to be. The listener unconsciously tries to apply transformations X, Y, and Z to fill in the blank, without success; however, the expended cognitive effort hitting the lexemes in the fragments from all different directions to get some meaning out of the sentence makes the listener's emotional response stronger". The expended effort from such a manipulation attempt is of course precisely what makes those ads so damn annoying. Is this an understood phenomenon? Could I be onto something interesting? Or does it just sound like nonsense? Thx. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 05:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's interesting: you have said the verb and object are missing; I would say the verb and subject are missing. I would complete then as "Wikipedia is our shared knowledge. Wikipedia is our shared treasure." The fragments are noun phrases, but that article doesn't talk about what happens when they are used on their own, so I can really help. --Tango (talk) 06:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Well? We're waiting, Tango!  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 06:49, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

And now you've said that I can't even correct my typo because it would make you look crazy and, for some reason, that is frowned upon... Grrrr... ;) --Tango (talk) 07:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

But I am crazy, and proud of it. Didn't you know?  :) -- JackofOz (talk) 07:49, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Does ellipsis help? TomorrowTime (talk) 06:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Not really. Ellipsis (linguistics) might, though. ;) --Tango (talk) 07:44, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Damn. That's what happens when you don't check what you link to :/ TomorrowTime (talk) 08:56, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

They're not supposed to be sentences. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 07:38, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

This reminds me of the series of signs you sometimes encounter when driving into a French village. They usually look as if they were put up in the 1950s. Typically, first sign: Bienvenue à Montrond-dans-le-Val. Next sign: Son église XII siecle. Next sign: Son marché (samedi). Next sign: Sa piscine. Next sign: Son musée de poupées. (Translation: Welcome to Roundhill-in-the-Valley. Its 12th century church. Its Saturday market. Its swimming pool. Its doll museum.) The lack of verbs is the same as in the original example, but using "our" instead of "its" indicates a more subtle advertising technique, drawing the reader in. But in general, is it not typical of advertising to use slogans that are as reduced and punchy as possible? Itsmejudith (talk) 11:18, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I think these kinds of ellipses are common in advertising where the missing words or phrases or clause for the sentence of the speech deemed to be understood by the audience (targeted audience in particular) as deictic elements.--Mihkaw napéw (talk) 12:22, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Short phrases are often used in advertising. Their creators are trying to grab the reader's attention. Lengthy sentences are less likely to do so than a few short words. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:13, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

These are minor sentences. One could force them to be into the nominal sentence category, I guess. Pallida  Mors 15:12, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

And anyway, the rule is that complete sentences have to end with a period (or question mark or exclamation point), not that every string of words that ends with a period has to be a complete sentence. Seriously. Pais (talk) 16:34, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Should there be capital letters beginning words in the middle of a sentence, as in: "Wikipedia Is Powered by People Like You?" Bus stop (talk) 16:47, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I would have expected an upstyle approach from a US PR firm. Odd. -- Александр Дмитрий (Alexandr Dmitri) (talk) 21:11, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

In terms of impact, they are supposed to enjoy similar benefits to sound bytes. They're snappy and help cut through what advertisers call "noise". Pithiness is attractive in modern slogans, tag lines, mottos, strap lines and the like, which is curious because historically (and even recently) there are some outstanding ones that are anything but pithy. --Dweller (talk) 16:55, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• Would you believe... sound bites? --Anonymous, 21:56 UTC, November 17, 2009.

"Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure" is the presentation of two ideas, the second of which qualifies the first. Knowledge is easier to accept than treasure, in terms of Wikipedia. Having accepted knowledge, as what Wikipedia has to offer, we are ready to consider whether it is treasure that we find here as well. One is less likely to reject the treasure designation after having first found little to object to in the knowledge designation. Bus stop (talk) 17:23, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It occurs to me that "shared treasure" could use a "citation needed" tag. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:37, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure" : ) ←Bus stop (talk) 01:41, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, and given that anyone can edit, anything can turn up in an article. So, as my old man might say, "we're using the term 'knowledge' advisedly." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Japanese translation

I'd be grateful if someone could translate this for me please. I believe it is a poem, possibly by or about Emperor Meiji (1852-1912).

• Asamidori sumiwataritaru ozorano
• Hiroki wo onoga kokoro tomogana

Many thanks81.156.126.150 (talk) 10:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's archaic Japanese, so I may make a mistake. Even a native might have trouble with it:

浅緑澄み渡りたる大空の

The clear, pale green sky

広き己が心ともなが

Would that my own heart were also so broad

According to this list of poetry, it was indeed composed by the Emperor Meiji. Paul Davidson (talk) 13:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much, and for confirming the Emperor Meiji authorship.81.156.126.150 (talk) 13:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

There are a few typos in both the romanization and the corresponding Japanese transcription. Corrected parts in bold:

asamidori sumiwataritaru ōzora no

浅緑澄み渡りたる大空の

hiroki o ono ga kokoro tomogana

広きを己が心ともがな

Also note that this is hardly archaic. The poem is little more than a hundred years old. There are a few pseudo-classical constructions such as -taru and -ki (modern -ta and -i, respectively), but this will not hurt comprehension. An average Japanese elementary student should have no problem understanding it. (A comparison would be like using thee or whence in modern English.) The translation is decent. 115.128.71.142 (talk) 08:05, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting my typos. :) Paul Davidson (talk) 11:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm collecting words which can't end sentences (properly).

So far, I've got 12 9 (except for clitics & contractions like: e.g., i.e., let's, it's, I'll):

a = an, the,

but (However, see Deor's comment below)

and, or, nor,

my, your, our, their, + thy

But, my, if, or only occur finally in lexicalized phrases, not really on their own.

Any other suggestions?

HOOTmag (talk) 20:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Than, if, every (?),

But. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC) Oops, already there. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't agree with "as".

I'm going to a fancy dress ball tonight.

Cool. What are you going as?. -- JackofOz (talk) 20:45, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you're right. I'm still looking for additional words. HOOTmag (talk) 21:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) As can end sentences when it's used as a preposition ("What is it known as?"), and so can but, at least when a bit of ellipsis is used ("Have you found any bones?" "I've found nothing but"). All of them can be used at the end of sentences when they're referred to as words ("In English, the definite article is the"), but that may be too trivial for your purposes. Deor (talk) 20:55, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

• As for the meaning of 'as' , you're right.
• As for the meaning of 'but' , you're right; however, I wouldn't like to use ellipses.
• As you've guessed correctly, I'm talking about the meaning of the word: 'the' , rather than about the very word 'the'. One should distinguish between: the, and: 'the' (the former being the meaning of the latter).
• Anyways, I'm still looking for additional words.

HOOTmag (talk) 21:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh my! :P Rimush (talk) 21:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

but can still end a sentence, even without ellipses. For example, in the somewhat slangy phrase "doing everything but", as in "they didn't have sex, they did everything but". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

That is an ellipsis, it is missing "have sex" at the end. --Tango (talk) 02:38, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The idea, though, is that it's become lexicalized: if you know the phrase, I could drop the "they didn't have sex" and just say "they did everything but", with no context, and you'd know what I mean. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Every word can end a sentence; this sentence ends with "a". — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:28, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's meaningless to even ask the question if we allow citations and ellipsis. With this constraint, it's an interesting question. (There's also 'thy'.) Instead of just coming up with new words, let's also see if we can come up with normal sentences (clauses) that end with these words.

We also need to discern homographs and clearly derivational usage. If we can find the NOR in "NOR-gate" in electronics at the end of a sentence, or the nor of 19-nor steroids in organic chemistry, I wouldn't remove "nor" from the list.

I can't think of anything that ends in "than" off hand. kwami (talk) 22:39, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It's not so much an issue of "can't end a sentence" as "heads/projects a phrase, and therefore needs something after it". Therefore, it seems that in English, things like determiners, co-ordinators, and complementizers (where they aren't homonymous...which all the English ones are, AFAIK) meet these criteria. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:58, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

But some of them can. If can end a sentence, as can as and but. So it's not quite so simple. If we take your class of words, which of them actually occur finally? And the possessive pronouns are bizarre too: we have two forms, one attributive and one non-attributive, though my is an exception even here. kwami (talk) 23:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

When can 'if' end a sentence? The only example I can think of is something like "The question is not when, the question is if", which is bordering on quotation (although maybe still acceptable). As for 'as' and 'but', in the 'as' examples above I would call 'as' a stranded preposition, rather than a coordinator, and in my 'but' example it's just part of a lexicalized phrase and is not part of 'but's normal behavior. As for the possessives, I assume that's just because one class of them behaves like a determiner (it projects an NP) and the other has noun behavior built-in. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

As if!

Yes, granted, 'if', 'but', and 'my' here are lexicalized phrases. That probably is a distinction we should note. (Can't end a clause unless part of phrase X.)

I wouldn't consider as as a prep and as as a coordinator as two words, but rather as two uses of the same word. Though as you mention with that below, this can st be a difficult distinction to make. kwami (talk) 23:38, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

(after four ecs) Kwamikagami's point about homographs is definitely worth noting. After all, the ancient Chinese Loulan civilisation was based around Lop Nor. I am, however, having trouble thinking of a sentence which could end in "every". Grutness...wha? 23:21, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

I think maybe the set phrase "all and every" might occur finally, but I'm not sure. kwami (talk) 23:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Somewhere a line needs to be drawn between which homonyms can be discarded and which can't. Take the word "that", for example. It really represents two or three different, homophonous, lexical items: that_COMP, as in "The dog that ate my homework...."; that_DET, as in "That dog ate my homework"; and a noun, that_N, "That is the dog that ate my homework".. The noun version clearly can end a sentence ("I want that."). The complementizer version cannot (I can't think of a way the determiner version can, either, although arguably that is part of the same lexical entry as the noun, since their meanings are the same even though their parts of speech are different). But should that_COMP be excluded because it happens to share the spelling and pronunciation of that_N? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:29, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

There's also attributive 'no' (absolutive 'none') vs. interjection 'no'. This starts getting difficult: these are all historically related, and there's no clear line separating words from uses of words in such situations. kwami (talk) 23:40, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

In response to this and your earlier comment, it seems now that the issue is more one of grammatical categories than of individual words. It seems (so far, at least), that we can identify some grammatical categories that can appear at the end of sentences, and some that cannot. Then, for word X (which has multiple uses X₁, X₂, X₃, etc., and each of these uses is a member of some grammatical category), if all of X's uses fall within one of those off-limits categories, then we can say "this word can't end a sentence". On the other hand, if one or more of its uses falls in a category that can end a sentence, then we say "this word can end a sentence"—ie, if one use can end a sentence, then the whole word is covered. For instance, the only has the_DET, so we say it can't end a sentence. as has as_PREP and as_COORD, one of which can't end a sentence and one of which can, so we say the 'word' as can end a sentence.

Lexicalized phrases may create exceptions (i.e., when all of X's uses fall within 'cannot-end-a-sentence' categories, but X is part of one lexicalized phrase that can). But in natural language, there are always going to be exceptions, so that's ok. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it isn't a problem, it's just interesting in the playing-around-with-language kinda way like coming up with words that have no vowels, or no consonants, or no rhymes. kwami (talk) 23:53, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

It may be pushing it, but: "You can't have both, it's either/or". Warofdreams talk 23:46, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's good. Again in a set phrase only. kwami (talk)

That's just an ellipsis again, though. It is short for "it's either that one or the other one". --Tango (talk) 02:52, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. It may have originated through ellipsis, but it's taken on a life of its own. S.o. who says, "You can't have both, it's either/or" isn't engaging in ellipsis the way saying "Although ..." is ellipsis; they're just parroting a set expression. kwami (talk) 07:31, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there any way of ending a sentence with "of"? Warofdreams talk 23:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"What's this a piece of?" As far as I know, any preposition can be stranded like that. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:52, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Good point. There may be exceptions - I can't think of a way to use "versus" like that. A few other thoughts: "whether", "although", "whereas". Warofdreams talk 00:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think those all fall under the heading of co-ordinating conjunctions, so as far as I can tell the list of categories is still determiners, co-ordinators, and complementizers. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 00:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

According to our article on grammatical conjunctions, "although" is a subordinating conjunction - and it appears "whereas" is, too. Again, according to our article on conjunctions, "whether" is a complementiser. Versus must be a preposition. Warofdreams talk 01:30, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, grammatically, we wouldn't expect any of them to end a clause. And formal words like "whereas" aren't likely to enter into lexicalized phrases the way "but" has. kwami (talk) 07:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you're trying to draw a bright line where there actually isn't one. Perhaps a question with a more verifiable answer is: what are the words that are least likely to appear at the end of a sentence when they appear at all? I'm tempted to fire up NLTK and find an answer. rspεεr (talk) 03:30, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Well yes, kwami acknowledged above that any word can end a sentence, and established some guidelines (i.e., excluding quotations, etc.) to make the question more meaningful. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 03:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

This is English. You can end a sentence with any word of your choosing. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:33, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

And you can speak English with tones if you wish, but that doesn't make it a tonal language. Rspεεr, there are some words that people don't end clauses with. It isn't a matter of probability, it just isn't done. (At least, to the extent that if you were to say it that way, people would either expect you to finish your sentence, or understand that you're leaving off the end.) Of course, you could coin a phrase, and if it catches on, you have a new exception: take "Peel Me a Grape", whether "polar-bear rug" is a verb. kwami (talk) 07:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

You sound irritated by my approach. If you want to answer a question about what people do or don't do in language, you can either speculate, or you can refer to a corpus, and I chose the corpus. rspεεr (talk) 08:43, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not irritated, it's just that a corpus like Brown isn't going to come close to answering the question. It's worth a shot to see if anything interesting turns up, but, as you note, it suggests that "united" doesn't appear in final position--clearly not a reliable result. We're not asking for frequency data, but a grammaticality judgement. Granted, grammaticality judgements depend on frequency, but at much lower rates than this corpus is capable of detecting. (A million words is nothing compared to what each of our brains has processed in recent memory.) I suppose we could run each of the negative results past larger corpora, but there would still by words like 'thy' which won't show up because they don't occur in the corpus at all, and probably thousands of uncommon words for which the lack of sentence-final attestation is statistically meaningless. kwami (talk) 09:24, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

This is pretty much a nice microcosm of a 40-odd-year-old debate in psycholinguistics/cognitive science/neurolinguistics, between structural and statistical models. Townsend & Bever (2001), Sentence Comprehension, has a nice overview of it. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 12:56, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Was that a response to me? Because I very much agree, which is why I wanted to rephrase it in terms of probability. Anyway, I just did this using NLTK on the Brown corpus. It's not quite a big enough corpus to answer the way I wanted, but here are the 20 most common words that never end a sentence in the Brown corpus:

an their its than our your because very during without every united until almost toward per although it's whether having.

Some of these are surprising, such as "having" and "united", because it's easy to construct sentences that do end with them -- they just don't happen in the corpus. And there are some clever ones much further down the list, such as "Rhode". rspεεr (talk) 04:01, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

What is it called when a word is used as a word type that isn't its natural word type, in an effort to defeat the original question: Example: I like the word 'and'. Would this be called noun-izing? Comet Tuttle (talk) 06:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Nominalization? 115.128.71.142 (talk) 07:34, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The use-mention distinction. rspεεr (talk) 07:53, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, good phrase. kwami (talk) 09:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Can't 'than' end a sentence? How about:

• I'm the only person you're older than.

hm?

HOOTmag (talk) 11:25, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I would agree. 'I am the only person older than whom you are' sounds ludicrous. --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 12:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Your "ludicrous" sentence isn't equivalent to my original one, because my sentence states that you're older than me (and me only), while your sentence states - just the opposite - that I'm older than you (and you only). Maybe you've meant: 'You are the only person older than whom I am', which is really as ludicrous as your original sentence, but is equivalent to my original sentence; but if so, then why not simply: 'You are the only person older than me', which is both equivalent to my original sentence and involving no ludicrosity! Anyways, My original sentence is grammatical, and that's sufficient for proving that 'than' can end a sentence. HOOTmag (talk) 01:29, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

You have it backwards. Kage's sentence does mean "you're older than me". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

KageTora's sentence is contradictory! It states:

• I am the only person older than whom you are;

But how can I be the only person older than whom you are, while you too are a person older than whom you are (because you're not a person younger than whom you are)!

I really misunderstood KageTora's sentence, because I thought that it's consistent and that it means that I am the only person older than you (and you only), but now I've realized that it's simply contradictory, as I've explained above.

HOOTmag (talk) 08:58, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

wtf? So you're saying that, if someone is not "younger than himself", then he must be "older than himself"? Seriously? rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

No. HOOTmag (talk) 20:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, but you're misunderstanding the sentence. I understand that English is not your native language, so don't worry about it. The sentence means "You are only older than one person, and that person is me"--it can be written as "I'm the only person whom you're older than". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:34, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

KageTora's sentence states:

• I am the only person older than whom you are;

Which is equivalent to:

• I am the only person than whom you are older;

Which is equivalent to:

• I am the only person whom you are older than;

Which is equivalent to:

• I am the only person you are older than.

Conclusion: I've really mistundersood KageTora's original sentence - twice, probably because of its awkwardness.

HOOTmag (talk) 16:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

"Properly" is a slippery concept in English. "Hey, I'm going to town. Wanna come with?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:46, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Which is grammatical only in certain German- and Yiddish-influenced varieties of American English. +Angr 16:13, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how this is a counterexample of anything. We already excluded prepositions from the list of categories that "can't" end sentences—in other words, any example of a preposition ending a sentence just supports what I proposed above. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:34, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

So does anyone have an example of a sentence ending with "versus"? If not, we haven't excluded them. Warofdreams talk 20:09, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Geek #1- So how would you say "A versus B" in reverse Polish notation?

Geek #2- "A B versus." 20.137.18.50 (talk) 20:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

That doesn't count, as it's in quotation (and not really English). versus may just be an unusual preposition and an exception to the rule. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 20:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

"John is the man my lawsuit is versus." +Angr 20:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

That does not sound grammatical to me. I notice that a quick Google for "lawsuit is versus" doesn't turn up a single use. Warofdreams talk 21:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Like I said, I think versus is just special. Meaning-wise, it's the same as "against", and it also is a preposition, but it can't be stranded like "against" can:

• Tomorrow's game is against the Dolphins. // Who's tomorrow's game against?
• ? Tomorrow's game is versus the Dolphins. // * Who's tomorrow's game versus?

What this suggests to me is that versus is no longer an active, living "word" of English, but is just part of a set structure ("A versus B"), which is idiomatic and can't be split apart like non-idiomatic phrases could. And, if versus has really fossilized like that, then it doesn't disprove my earlier generalization about prepositions (since it's just an idiosyncratic exception, not a counterexample). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 21:43, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I would say sans has entered the English lexicon (Unless you insist that someone who says sans serif would be considered by the average American to be speaking a foreign language). 71.161.49.20 (talk) 21:50, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Just because the phrase "sans serif" has entered the lexicon doesn't mean 'sans' alone has (that would be like saying faire has entered the English lexicon because laissez-faire and savoir-faire have). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 22:15, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/SANS 71.161.49.20 (talk) 22:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Great, you could have presented that dictionary entry the first time around, rather than a bogus argument about "sans serif". rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:36, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

"Sans" as a cute way of saying "without", as in Leonard Maltin's review of the Blue Lagoon ripoff called Paradise: "Both actors do look good sans clothing." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

(1) Time was, 'way back when in the lost days of yesteryear, when almost every English-speaker was familiar with the Seven Ages of Man ("All the world's a stage ...") in Shakespeare's As You Like It, where the last scene is "mere oblivion: sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything" (Act II, scene 7, probably taking the terminology from heraldic blazon).

(2) "So are you going to set that page in Futura or in Gill Sans?" —— Shakescene (talk) 04:54, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

e.g. and i.e. are in the dictionary and go before the thing they're exemplifying or saying. 71.161.49.20 (talk) 11:23, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I'd already indicated them in my original post (see the first line, before "a, "an", "the"), but somebody deleted them, so I've put them back. HOOTmag (talk) 12:03, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

So, returning to the original question, I think we've agreed that the following words cannot end a sentence, with the given constraints: a/an, although, and, nor, our, sans, the, their, therefore, thy, versus, whether, your. Warofdreams talk 14:12, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

The point is not so much listing words, it's identifying the right categories. "Words that can't end sentences" can be shown to be either a) members of those categories; or c) unusual or fossilized words that are exceptions to the rule. Based on the discussion above, the categories so far seem to be determiners, complementizers, and coordinators.

COMP	DET	COORD
although, whether	a/an, our, their, the, thy, your	and, nor, therefore
Exceptions: sans, versus

As you can see, most of the words identified can be fit into these categories; the only two exceptions are both fossilized (i.e., very limited-use) prepositions. Words that are members of the above categories that cannot be used, such as that and as, can be shown either to have homonyms (e.g., complementizer that is homophonous with pronoun that) or to belong to multiple categories, including categories that can be sentence-final (e.g., as the coordinator can't be sentence-final, but as is also a preposition, which can be). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:48, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

How about: because, during, every, or ??? HOOTmag (talk) 16:27, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

"That's the test I got sick during." +Angr 16:35, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

'Because' is a complementizer, 'or' is a coordinator, and 'every' is a determiner. 'During', as Angr points out, is a preposition, and therefore can end a sentence. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:38, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Why should we make a distinction between although, because, whether, or between and, nor, or, therefore, or between a/an, every, our, their, the, thy, your ? HOOTmag (talk) 16:47, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Like I said, they're different categories, just like nouns and verbs are. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:59, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, I'm not really trying to make a distinction, I'm trying to show how they fit into already-defined groups so you can see that they are already explained. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:10, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

You've misunderstood me. I asked three questions:

1. Why should we make a distinction between: although, because, whether?
2. Why should we make a distinction between: and, nor, or, therefore?
3. Why should we make a distinction between: a/an, every, our, their, the, thy, your ?

HOOTmag (talk) 17:08, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

No one is making distinctions within those groups. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:10, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

You have made such a distinction! Your table doesn't include the words: because, during, every, or, so I asked:

• How about: 'because', 'during', 'every', 'or' ???

And you answered:

• 'Because' is a complementizer, 'or' is a coordinator, and 'every' is a determiner.

So I ask you again: why have you made distinctions within those categories, by omitting the three words from your table?

HOOTmag (talk) 17:23, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I didn't purposely omit them, the table I made was based only on Warofdreams' list of words, as it was a direct response to his comment and I didn't want to go through the lengthy discussion above to comb out everything else. Anyone is free to add new words; just because I didn't list every possible word doesn't mean I was treating them differently. Please don't assume other peoples' intentions. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:34, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I haven't talked about "intentions", but rather about deeds and about concrete factual distinctions. Anyways, after you've clarified you original intention (about which I'd never made any assumption), I have no additional questions. HOOTmag (talk) 17:44, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

The categories are of interest, but they are not going to answer the original question on their own, which is the point here. We are aware that some words in these categories can be placed at the end of a sentence (in a set phrase or through use in another part of speech), and we have two words outside these categories which cannot be placed at the end of a sentence. Warofdreams talk 16:52, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but if you ignore categories and just list words then you miss the underlying generalization about why certain words behave this way, and that is the thing that's actually informative in this whole exercise. So really, I feel it's the opposite of what you've sayd—the categories are what really answers the question with explanatory power, and it's the word list that's just 'interesting'. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:59, 19 November 2009 (UTC)