During our cocktail hour banter while the dinner was cooking,
my wife asked if I thought we were old and ugly yet, and I  replied, "Not
necessarily,
when I was your age I was twice as ugly."
 
She caught the ambiguity in my less than perfectly coherent response
and wanted to know whose ugliness I was talking about (twice as ugly as she is
now or twice as ugly as I am now?)
 
According to the early tranformationalists, when you ask, what does it
mean to know a language (as a native speaker), one o-3  rWpUqhS/QtQv7t_-1gtf
the answers is
"to have the ability to recognize ambiguity." I was amused by this turn in
our conversation because it was the non-native speaker from Kobe who
noticed the ambiguity, not I, the English professor born in Albany, NY.
 
I think that one could put together a whole course in grammar for
kids based on the unraveling of ambiguities and similar puzzels. For example,
take Chomsky's
example of ambiguity: "Flying planes can be dangerous." The ambiguity
of this sentence depends on recognizing the difference between a gerund (with
an object)
and a presnt participle, something any school child knows unconsciously.
But learning the terminology and consciously understanding the concepts
of these word classes makes it easier to talk about the ambiguity (or so I
might say to a class of high school students).
 
Garden path sentences constitute another conundrum that could lead
to some fun with language learning: "The florist sent the flowers was pleased."
An easy way to talk about the reason people trip up when they read this
sentence is that their brains expect SVO, the major pattern of English
sentences (and now, kids, would you like to know what SVO means?)
We could teach the occasional value of punctuation after introductory elements
with
anouther GP sentence: "While the cannibals ate the missionary cooked at
the stove."
 
        --Bill Murdick
 
        P.S. Sorry about the screw up in the message. My machine is
being independent today.