Learn English – Use of yet in the middle of a sentence

grammar

I found the following example that I'm unsure of its correctness.

The goals of X are to establish a theoretically well-founded yet practical and comprehensible Y.

I've searched for the uses of yet and this one, albeit completely understandable, does not appear.

Best Answer

TL,DR It's a poor example of yet usage because it is based on an idiomatic relationship between theory and practice that conflicts with the formal register being used for the expression of goals.

To a native speaker, this use is basically ignored. It means and, but reminds us of the longstanding idea that theory and practice are often regarded as in conflict.

To be clear, the writer did not need to use yet here. "The goals of X are to establish a theoretically well-founded, practical and comprehensible Y" is in many ways a more satisfactory sentence.

Furthermore, I associate comprehension with theory more so than practice, so it's on the wrong side of the yet if you parse it as " [...] a theoretically well-founded, (practical and comprehensible) Y." To get it to parse as "[...] (a theoretically well-founded yet practical) and comprehensible Y" I would replace the and with a comma. That distances the comprehensible from the yet.