Hi,
Sometimes I read the answers from our moderators, I can sense a bit of
frustration in their trying to explain the naturalness of a sentence / part of speech.
I've had my share of frustration while trying to show what's natural and
what's not in my language to my students. I have encountered situations in
which they asked for my help analyzing their speaking patterns, and I could
only tell them that sometimes grammatical perfection was the telltale.
There were times when my students got creative with the language and they
sounded odd yet good for sitcoms. However, these mishaps could be explained.
When I was able to do so, we both had a good laugh.
Naturalness is the cultural thing that has gone through
years of selection process. Even what was a norm in the past might sound odd to
us today; and the problem is that the great majority of people don't seem to
know why!
That said, upon reflecting on the usages of my language, I can sense that the
oddity often comes from the awkwardness or addition of words that extraneous in context. There are cases in which a word could be interpreted in more
than one way; thus, we tend to shy away from using it in potentially confusing
patterns. These patterns are then considered unnatural.
Now, not trying to create more frustration for our native English speaking
friends, I still must ask for an opinion on why It's far from here is
not as natural as It's a long way from here. Is it true that no
native English speaker would use the word far in this context? But isn’t
it natural to ask, "How far is it from here?”
Let's take a look at this pattern: It's far enough from here that I
think you should .. Why is that pattern is natural, but if we remove the
word enough and that I think you should ..., then the
remaining part becomes unnatural? Does the word far connote an
idea that might create confusion without additional context?
Any comments?
Thanks,