Your classmate Clarence says we readily produce routine expressions like
“What time is it?” and “Fine, thanks” because we hear them so frequently.
But he wonders how we produce and understand sentences we’ve never
heard before. What do you think?
• Your sidekick Amber reports that reading Steven Pinker’s The Language
Instinct made her think about ambiguous language. She understands how
a word like bank can mean ‘savings bank’ or ‘bank of a river’ but not how
a string of unambiguous words like new drug combinations can mean both
‘combinations of new drugs’ and ‘new combinations of (old) drugs.’ What’s
your explanation?
• With the Los Angeles Times in hand, reader Ron asks whether it’s legitimately
grammatical to write, “Not a drop of rain had fallen on Roanoke Island, said
John Wilson.” He thinks the correct grammatical form is, “John Wilson said
Words and Their Parts:
Lexicon and Morphology