ABSTRACT
At first blush our language appears to be full of redundancy in its grammar. We’ve already come across a number of different constructions that seem to convey precisely the same information. Pairs of sentences like Lancelot loved Guinevere and Guinevere was loved by Lancelot and Merlin gave the Chief Druid a note and Merlin gave a note to the Chief Druid don’t contrast in basic (or propositional) meaning – but their stylistic effects are very different. Which construction we choose depends on what part of our message we want to highlight, what we think is most important, or even what we assume our audience already knows. This sort of grammatical overkill is in the language for a reason.
