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 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/