grammaticality - Is this sentence grammatically correct or punny (or both)?


I have a comment on this question where I refer to a list of three examples deemed 'valid'. I said: "I think the last valid example is not."


The sentence sounds kind of strange (I did that on purpose). Is it grammatically correct? Is it just like some kind of pun?



Answer



It is an example of ellipsis. You are eliding the word valid at the end of the sentence “I think the last valid example is not valid.”


It is perfectly grammatical. It might be considered a kind of use–mention distinction pun if you had put the word valid in quotation marks, as in



I think the last “valid” example is not.



Here, the first instance of the word valid is a mention but the elided second instance is a use. That is, you weren’t saying the example was valid, but just using the word valid as a label that someone else used for the example. In the second clause, you use ellipsis to refer back to the word valid but this time you mean to use the word valid for its meaning and not as a label.


This is definitely wordplay entailing multiple meanings, which is what a pun is, but usually a pun uses two different meanings of a word; whereas in this case, you are punning use and mention of a word.


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