The Personality of a Syntactician

I have written this blog post to highlight some personality traits of syntacticians (Ordinary Working Grammarians). It is meant for both linguists and non-linguists.

You know you are a syntactician when….

1.

You are talking to somebody, but start to drift off because they just produced an interesting sentence.

2.

After explaining the fine points of Spanish grammar to your friend, they are surprised to learn that you do not speak a single word of it.

3.

You try to steer the conversation in the direction of interesting syntactic constructions, and your friends and family roll their eyes and snicker, saying ‘Here we go again!’

4.

You obsess over an interesting new sentence you have just noticed, even losing sleep.

5.

You tend to gravitate towards being with other syntacticians, with whom you can discuss ‘cool facts’.

6.

You pester your friends and family by asking for grammaticality judgments, even your own children.

7.

When reading a novel, you sometimes stop in the middle of a page to think about the structure of sentences. 

8.

You love to talk to foreigners because of the interesting grammatical patterns in their speech.