Is there anything ungrammatical about this sentence, beyond...

[Randy Alexander]

"I started puberty at 13" doesn't suggest it was my idea.

I guess you could argue that nobody willfully pubesces while cultivation is
always willful. (But thinking further you might be opening up a nice can of
worms -- so many expressions are anthropomorphic, expressing inanimate
things in human terms. Where would you draw the line?)

Nothing syntactically wrong.
On Jul 6, 2014 11:54 PM, "Laurence Horn" <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Is there anything ungrammatical about this sentence,
>               beyond...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 6, 2014, at 11:02 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> > "I wouldn't put it this way"?
> >=20
> > Purslane started its cultivation in India and Persia.
>
> This does seem to suggest fairly strongly that this was purslane's idea. =
>  Could be the writer started with something perfectly normal like  =
> "Purslane began being cultivated=85" or "Purslane was first =
> cultivated=85", only to get a comment from the grammar check tsk-tsking =
> over the use of the passive.
>
> LH
>
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