Pancake sentences are a phenomenon in
Scandinavian languages where
sentence agreement does not follow conventional linguistic patterns. An example from Swedish is the sentence , literally translating to "Pancakes
is healthy" and meaning "Eating pancakes is healthy".
The phrase appears to have been coined by Hans-Olav Enger in a 2004 academic paper, "Scandinavian pancake sentences as semantic agreement" but it was well-known also by classic grammar and was dubbed "
constructio ad sensum
In linguistics, synesis () is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term referring to agreement (the change of a word form based on words relating to it) due to meaning.
A ''constructio kata synesin'' ( la, constructio ad sensum) is a grammatical ...
" or "syllepsis"; see
zeugma and syllepsis. Enger states that pancake sentences are "where the predicative adjective apparently disagrees with its subject". This phenomenon may be related or compared to English language linguistics, where
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lan ...
speakers might say "",
syntactically
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
agreeing the singular ''team'', versus
British English speakers saying "", agreeing
semantically to the collective noun ''team''. A common French example with quantifying expressions such as or fractions like , with countable nouns: → is grammatically singular, but has a plural meaning, thence the plural agreement of the verb.
An example from Swedish is the sentence :
While 'pancakes' is plural and of common gender, 'healthy' is inflected to singular and neuter.
A similar phenomenon also occurs in
Hebrew, where the copula (and adjectives) appear to disagree with the subject.
Sources
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References
{{reflist
2004 neologisms
Syntax
North Germanic languages