There's no such thing as a haunted house.

English grammar questions, answered by Alan

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paracompact
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There's no such thing as a haunted house.

Post by paracompact »

(1) There's no such thing as a haunted house.

(2) There's no thing such as a haunted house.

Question: Why is (2) incorrect?
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Alan
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Re: There's no such thing as a haunted house.

Post by Alan »

It rather depends on your definition of 'incorrect'.

If, by 'incorrect', you mean 'grammatically impossible', your second sentence is not incorrect.

However, most linguists would also include among 'incorrect' (or 'unacceptable') sentences those that, while not transgressing any citable syntactic rule, would nonetheless be considered so unnatural or unidiomatic by the majority of speakers as to be effectively unusable.

Your second sentence would probably fall into that category.
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