Chapter 6

It is difficult for me to comment on grammar without knowing exactly how much of my understanding of sentence structure is a result of instruction and how much was just picked up over time. In school, I remember getting frustrated by my inability to understand the lessons my teachers were trying to explain to me. I remember how pointless and tedious it seemed. The book mentions "who" and "whom" as an example of an oft misused pair. Personally, that was the one that seemed like the biggest waste of time and energy. In our assignments, we had to go through a long process, showing our work as though we were in math class, all to find out whether or not we were supposed to use "whom" instead of "who." We had to identify and label the parts of the sentence in order to determine the correct word for the sentence (a process no normal person would take the time to think through before speaking), and in the end I just read the sentence and wrote the answer that sounded right to me, disregarding all my work scrawled in the margins. A few years later, after I had the chance to see both words used contextually many more times, it occurred to me that authors used "who" when the person was doing the action, and they used "whom" when the action was being done to the person. At the age of 17, that explanation was satisfactory for me. It had nothing to do with the formal names for parts of speech, nor did it have anything to do with formalized analysis of sentence structure, but it worked. It makes me question the way I was taught, and it makes me wonder how class time could have been better spent.

I'll get off my soapbox now. Chomsky! I'll talk about him instead. Williams mentions Chomsky's assertion that "the number of possible sentences in any language is infinite because language allows for endless expansion" (200). Because there is an infinite number of word combinations, language cannot be entirely formally instructed. One cannot teach another to string just the right words together to form a point because the spectrum is endless. To utilize an example from Chomsky's Powers and Prospects, the sentence I am typing right now may have never been spoken or written before. I did not hear this sentence and regurgitate it. No one taught me to type these things, yet I am cognitively able to put the necessary pieces together to formulate an understandable, complete thought. As was mentioned in the Williams text, there must at least be some innate capacity for language acquisition.