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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 96
usually marked (rather informally) with question marks. Any such intermediate
steps are not well defined, and the relative grammaticality or acceptability
of the constructions under consideration is the important feature.
Radford (1981) is fairly conservative, apparently working with three degrees
of ungrammaticality, illustrated by the sentences in (3) (from Radford 1981:
72).
(3) a. John certainly washed the dishes.
b. ?John washed certainly the dishes.
c. *John washed the certainly dishes.
Other authors propose rather more degrees of ungrammaticality, with Ross
(1973: 190) explicitly ranking six: OK, ?, ??, ?*, *, **.
Ungrammaticality is distinguished in principle from semantic oddity, sometimes
called semantic ill-formedness, which is shown by an exclamation mark.
Radford (1981: 10) illustrates this with examples such as those in (4), but he
points out that the borderline between ungrammaticality and unsemanticity
may not be clear cut.
(4) a. !I killed John, but he didn’t die.
b. !All my friends are linguists, but I don’t have any friends.
Unfortunately, the use of the exclamation mark is not completely general.
For example, Huddleston & Pullum (2002) use the hash mark ‘#’ for
‘semantically or pragmatically anomalous’ and the exclamation mark for
‘non-standard’. Other idiosyncratic markers include ‘@ ’ (ambiguous or
attested depending on the source), ‘&’ (ambiguous) and ‘%’ (dialectally variable).
Reconstruction
An asterisk is also used to mark a reconstructed form in historical linguistics.
A reconstructed form is one for which there is no direct evidence, but which
seems to be presupposed given the later developments in related languages.
The starred word is a hypothesis about the form a word is likely to have had at
an earlier stage of the language. Consider, for example, modern Romance
words for ‘uncle’, as in (5).
(5) French oncle
Italian zio
Spanish tío
Portuguese tiu