You know your a syntactician when...

This was originally posted March 31, 2011 on Facebook. Changes and updates are in red.

You know you are a syntactician when…

1. You get distracted in conversations when people use an unexpected or interesting syntactic construction.
2. You know what the phrase "interesting syntactic construction" means.
3. You sometimes consciously parse what people say as they speak, and visualize the trees.
4. You get excited about going to a foreign country because the language spoken there might have some cool word order fact.
5. You think that all of morphology, all of semantics and large parts of phonology are just syntax.
6. You think there is nothing bizarre or unusual about the idea of word that is not actually pronounced.
7. You badger your loved ones mercilessly with sentences, asking them if they are acceptable or not.
8. One of the things you find enjoyable about reading to your children is stumbling upon interesting syntactic constructions.
9. You share headlines on Facebook that illustrate cool syntactic facts.
10. You surprise your friends by knowing huge amounts about the grammar of languages that you cannot speak a single word of.