Craig,

Part of the problem is you misremember what I write.

No, I did not do the following:

   Rather than ask an open-ended question, you threw a sentence at me and
then challenged me to discuss how cognitive grammar would deal with it.
Otherwise, I would have answered more directly out of my own
experience.

You wrote that you subscribe to a theory of language which denies innateness and claims that what we know about language is the result of the forms we have been exposed to.

I gave a REAL sentence a student wrote, a mixed construction, and asked how would a theory based on forms we have been exposed to account for it.  

This "innovative sentence" I suggested raises interesting questions about a claim that what we know about language comes only from the forms we have been exposed to.  

Again, I hope you think about what this means for developing writers:

   In a writing class, I start very early with the idea that a sentence
can be thought of as a construal of an experience, and that comes up
quite a bit with writing decisions. Can we construe that differently?
Obviously, different syntactic options are part of that, but are also
treated as inherent to the system.

Does a mixed construction fall under your notion of a sentence?  If so, what is the experience that it is a construal of?  If not, why do developing writers produce them?  

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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