ABSTRACT
Summary: How much detail we expect a grammar to provide is a recurrent problem. Some things are pragmatically odd (e.g. My husband is pregnant again) without necessarily being ungrammatical. There are good arguments for saying that such oddity is not a matter of grammar. There are other cases which are much closer to the boundary between grammatical and ungrammatical (consider, for instance, She sneezed me). Sometimes what we say seems to be determined by the individual words involved (like sneeze). But there are many cases where what we say is a matter of custom rather than a linguistic matter. Whether you say It is five past three or It is five after three is a matter of unspoken community agreement: you probably say only one of these (depending on the community you live in), but the other can scarcely be said to be ungrammatical. Although grammar regulates much of what we say, some parts of what we say are governed by such norms rather than by grammar.
