Must sell

I am a member of Facebook buy/sell/swap/free group in my local area. One member is selling an item of furniture with the explanation:

Must sell father in nursing home

Just … no.

Wrong or right?

I’ve been sorting through paper documents and computer files, and been finding all sorts of miscellaneous things. One is a photocopy of a page from a textbook, at the bottom of which I wrote two sentences spoken by two students. This is at least two-and-a-half years old (that is, before I went to Korea the second time) and is more likely to be closer to four (I vaguely remember that it dates from when another teacher and I swapped upper- and lower-level classes for two days each week – these sentences came from the lower-level class).

The activity was “Speaking: Real life”. Seven scenarios are given, and I got the students to write their sentences before they spoke them (which is why I was able to copy these two sentences; I probably wouldn’t have had time if they had just spoken them). One scenario is “You are buying a ticket in a railway station. The clerk says the price of the ticket but you don’t understand him. What do you say?”

One student wrote (and later said):

Sorry I not good English so you writing this paper please.

The second sentence isn’t related to the same activity, and I can’t think of the context. Anyway, another student wrote:

I can’t ride motorcycle, because I’m not learn ride bicycle yet. But I have learn drive car before.

These sentences are “wrong”, but in many ways they are very “right” – most of the right words are there, in the right order, and there’s absolutely no doubt what those students meant; most of what is missing is the “grammar”.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember what I said about those sentences, or how I went about correcting them.

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extraposition and dislocation

Yesterday during my bible study, I spotted the following sentence in discussion of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians:

Whether this outlook is “gnostic” in the nontechnical sense that it merely placed an unusually high premium on “knowledge” (gnōsis) and “wisdom” (sophia) or in the more technical sense that it stemmed from a system of thought resembling second-century *gnosticism is a matter of ongoing debate.

(You can ignore the theology and church history; this post is about language.)

Huh?

A few days ago I explored a box of class materials accumulated by a colleague or colleagues unknown. One of them was a set of small, laminated slips of paper with one or two words each:

The aim is obviously to create sentences, but that’s easier said than done. The sentences aren’t from any textbook I’ve used or seen, and searching online for the five names returns nothing useful.