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postilion sentence. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
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English
Etymology
Refers to the phrase "My postillion has been struck by lightning," said to be an example of the unusual terms found in some 19th- and early 20th-century phrasebooks.
Noun
postilion sentence (plural postilion sentences)
- (linguistics) A phrase that is linguistically correct, but of no realistically practical use.
1990, Jack Matthews, Memoirs of a Bookman, Ohio University Press, page 115:As good as the peccadillo sentence is, it is not on a par with the postilion sentence. Nothing is. That sentence is cast in golden moonshine and should never be disturbed.
1995, David Crystal, “Postilion Sentences”, in Journal of Clinical Speech and Language Studies, volume 5, page 15:To test whether a candidate sentence is a postilion sentence, all we have to do is try to identify the context(s) in which it would be used. If we have difficulty finding a plausible context, then we have such a sentence.
2004, Margaret M. Leahy, “Therapy Talk: Analyzing Therapeutic Discourse”, in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in School, volume 35, page 77:In the practice sentence, C emulates P’s model and provides another model or postilion sentence.