We serve you grill!
Any thoughts about this? The problem lies in the word grill. But before going deeper into the discussion, we must understand where this sentence came from. Context is crucial in faciltating our understanding of a phrase because it directs our thought processes along a certain line. Ok, this was a Burger King advertisement that I came across while I was on my way to university.
Firstly, when we look at the word grill, our mental lexicon, comprised of a complex network systems immediately sends signal to words that are in one way or another connceted to the word grill. Together with context, the first thing which comes to mind is food. Hence, the advertisement here is implying to observers that it is at Burger King where grilled food will be served. But the phrasing here is not natural.
When we dine at restaurants ,have you ever heard waitors saying:
1.) We serve you baked. (Baked what? )
2.) We serve you deep-fried. (deep-fried what? )
I tried googling this phrase 'serve you grill' but it does not seem to appear in most search engines regardless of the region. The concordance sampler does not seem to be useful here because the concordance sampler gives a corpus where the context in which the word is used is too general. If we limit the context to food, the phrase "serve you grill..."must be accompanined with a NP. In addition, I wish to highligh that even grill should be in the past form "grilled" because food has already this process of grilling before it can be served. Thus it would sound abnormal to say grill food.
If we change this grill to grilled such that we get" we serve you grilled..." we further propose that a NP must proceed the word grilled. So we should say things like "we served you grilled chicken, grilled hamburgers etc.
Doing a google search , we observe that grilled is always accompanied with a NP (food item) if the context is limited to food.