The asterisk from historical to descriptive and theoretical linguistics
An historical note
The use of the asterisk in descriptive and theoretical linguistics is attested well before the 1950s (contrary to what has been maintained by Householder in 1973). It is suggested that the meaning of the asterisk was extended from that of ‘unattested form’, which was standard in historical linguistics, to that of ‘unattested form’ in sense of ‘non-existent’; a further step was to assign to the asterisk the meaning of ‘impossible form’, hence also of ‘ungrammatical sentence’.
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Abrusán, Márta
2019.
Semantic Anomaly, Pragmatic Infelicity, and Ungrammaticality.
Annual Review of Linguistics 5:1
► pp. 329 ff.
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