-1

I can't find the reason why : riceful and antful are ungrammatical. Can someone help me? Thanks

bobby millerd
  • 35
  • 1
    You might be interested in the site for [linguistics.se]. – Matt E. Эллен Oct 06 '14 at 10:20
  • 1
    related: What are the criteria to adopt new words into English? – Matt E. Эллен Oct 06 '14 at 10:22
  • 3
    'Ungrammatical' in the sense usually used here means 'breaking some rule of syntax'. Since syntax doesn't apply to individual words or non-words, your question should be 'Why are riceful and antful not acceptable words?' Are you saying that any combinations of letters might properly be regarded as an acceptable word, that adding -ful to any noun should generate an acceptable word, or just that you would like 'antful' and 'riceful' to be acceptable words? – Edwin Ashworth Oct 06 '14 at 10:48
  • This may interest you: http://www.thefullwiki.org/-ful http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/-ful and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_words_suffixed_with_-ful – Kris Oct 06 '14 at 12:07

1 Answers1

3

I think you've misunderstood what grammatical means. The words you've cited are simply not used by anyone I've ever heard or read.

If they had a meaning they could be put in a sentence.

Let's give one a meaning: antful means the amount of something that could fill an ant.

You've got thousands of antfuls of milk there.

I have used that word grammatically.

A word without context is not ungrammatical, it's just meaningless.

Matt E. Эллен
  • 29,137