Sentence Structure

I'll punch anyone who looks at me -- I'll punch him in the nose.

winner

I WILL PUNCH IN THE NOSE ANYONE WHO LOOKS AT ME

"As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical." - Frank Chodorov

I changed it because I feared anti-libertarian backlash. Can one of you grammarians tell me if I should feel silly quoting him (aside from the political context)?

this is a weird question and an odd thread to bump, but i'm thinking ILX would be a good place to ask this.

without going into too much detail, i'm trying to create 2 pools of short sentence fragments, A and B, such that any fragment from A would make some sort of sense when combined with any fragment from B. ideally, it would also make some sort of sense in the opposite direction as well (B to A), and most ideally of all, an endless sequence of A > B > A > B > A etc would continue to make some sort of sense.

i'm guessing that one way to go would be to think of grouping the fragments grammatically (e.g., A fragments contain subjects, B fragments contain predicates). i'm also thinking of grouping things more abstractly, so that social and more positive snippets go in one pool, and colder and negative fragments go in the other.

i'm having trouble finding what i'm looking for via googling. does anyone have thoughts on this, and good sources i can take a look at? i realize my description has been very confusing and meandering, so i can try to clarify if needed, but i'm very flexible on this. i could see creating something that would result in grammatically sound full sentences, but i'm also interested in something that is much more abstract.

I'm sorry I'm not able to help, but I think this image belongs here:

http://www.teleiosministries.com/images/ephesians_clip_image002.gif

i heavily encourage the posting of those kind of images here (and elsewhere)

i don't know why i went into the A vs B example, sorry. as agonizing as it may be to read my longwinded posts, it's even more exhausting to live it. really what i meant to ask is just:

please share your experimental sentence structure (or "sentence logic"(?)) links or ideas

The underlying structures of sentences are
the primary units of immediate speech processing

seems promising

idk if this will help but formal language theory is cool as hell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar

"Formal language theory, the discipline that studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas."

yes! this may be very useful indeed, thanks!

i'm like a cat playing baseball right now, but if i can even grasp a small bit of any of this it will be very helpful

A
because he felt ill
after their lunch
during the rainstorm

B
he took a nap
we got more than we bargained for
lyle laughed like a wounded ferret

that sort of thing?

knowledge of grammar will help a lot as has been pointed out - english speakers rarely learn what all the different phrase types are called, or even the different tenses we use. but a lot of countries (like france) really drill the knowledge of formal grammar into you

yeah, tracer! your sets are broken down into main clauses (B) and subordinate clauses (A), right? my knowledge of english grammar is very poor (as should be evident by my history of unintentional shitposts), which is embarrassing for me, but i'm just trying to be honest.

my first attempts have wound up pretty similar to what you have there, and it's already "working" to an extent. i guess i'm just looking for "experimental" ways to think about how 2 sets of clauses can relate to each other, how much you can bend things before they break. in addition to formal language theory, i'm also looking into structural linguistics and semiotics to see if anything there might help.

english speakers rarely learn what all the different phrase types are called, or even the different tenses we use

OTM. One of the main bits of my primary / secondary education I wish was better. Think it would improve learning foreign languages in the classroom too.

Kind of related, are there any measures of efficiency across languages?

Doing my Duolingo Hungarian tree and "Mi az?" translates as "What is that?" and "Mi ez?" translates as "What is this?". These strike me as efficient expressions, though certainly cherry-picked examples.

Now obviously each language is limited by it's alphabet or rather words that sound distinct barring hononyms, and all the short pronounceable words will probably be filled up quite quickly. For English: A, aa, aah, aardvark, ab, aba, abac. Already you've got the word aard for example that isn't used (perhaps because it could be mistaken for a Westmidlands farmer saying hard).

One measure of efficiency could be how many of the pronounceable, distinct sounding words are actually utilised? I'm guessing this has been investigated by someone somewhere before but my google searches are letting me down.

Even homonyms should result in increased efficiency, apart from in situations where further clarification will be needed.

Finnish might be a contender, with it's seemingly infinite word endings, seems to convey more meaning in a shorter sentence. Any thoughts?

Poor Lyle :-(

One measure of efficiency could be how many of the pronounceable, distinct sounding words are actually utilised?

yeah, that's a good question! the ratio of words to possible words would seem to depend on how long the words can be, or how they can be extended if necessary. as you mentioned, some languages seem to be better suited to being extended than others (german is the first that comes to mind, probably because of the stereotype about really complex things that can only be truly expressed using an incredibly long german word).