WHY IS THIS UNGRAMMATICAL?

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Question1. Could you turn off the fire and on the light?2. He ran down the road and down the president.3. I know the truth and that you are innocent.4. Lee went to the store and crazy.

Ozzourti · Accepted Answer

They are awkwardly worded, inasmuch as they all make the reader backtrack to the beginning to piece together what is being said. What is more, the first part of each sentence (except #1 and #3, maybe) is practically unrelated to its second part.

AlpheccaStars · Answer

1. Could you turn off the fire and turn on the light? You cannot separate the particle from the verb in a phrasal verb.

2. He ran down the road and down the president. The phrasal verb in the second part "run down;" the normal meaning of "run" is in the first part.

3. I know the truth, that you are innocent. The original has a lack of parallelism. The first object is a simple direct object, and the second is a clause. These different structures are not parallel.

4. Lee went to the store and did something crazy. We expect a compound verb - a verb to follow the conjunction, not an adjective.

Fivejedjon · Answer

AlpheccaStars1. Could you turn off the fire and turn on the light? You cannot separate the particle from the verb in a phrasal verb.

You can. We can say Could you turn the fire off? - at least in British English.

I think that the main problem in the original is that 'on' is where we would expect a verb to be. It would be acceptable as Could you turn the fire off and the light on? in my opinion.

CalifJim · Answer

Anonymous ~~WHY IS THIS UNGRAMMATICAL?~~ Why is this ungrammatical?

Not all caps, please!

They are ungrammatical because they use "and" to connect unequal elements. The inequality may be syntactic (different parts of speech; different structures) or semantic (different meaning).

For example, 2 has two meanings for "ran down". One applies to "the road"; the other to "the president". Here there is semantic inequality. Once you use words in one meaning, you can't then suddenly switch to another meaning later in the same sentence. Often, especially if a literal meaning is combined this way with an idiomatic meaning, such a sentence will cause laughter.

The inequality in 3 is more syntactic. There "and" is used to connect a noun phrase ("the truth") with a content clause ("that you are innocent").

In short, they are all ungrammatical because they misuse the conjunction "and".

She drove off in a Cadillac and a bad mood.

CJ

AlpheccaStars · Answer

fivejedjonYou can. We can say Could you turn the fire off? - at least in British English.

Thanks for the correction. I meant it to apply to the structure of sentence #1 where the particle immediately follows the first verb.
You can if the object comes between the verb and particle.

Please turn on the light and turn off the radio. (To me, this is the most natural.)
Please turn the light off and the radio on. (parallel structure)
X Please turn off the light and on the radio. (non-parallel structure)

CalifJim · Answer

AlpheccaStarsPlease turn the light off and the radio on. (parallel structure)

It should be noted, however, that mere parallel structure is not enough. The two connected elements have to be in the same semantic field, as they are here. For example, the following is as parallel (structurally) as the example above; yet it doesn't work semantically.

*He took his shirt off and the garbage out.

CJ

WHY IS THIS UNGRAMMATICAL?

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