Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 3 (or Hell hath no fury like a woman who's told she's a grammar ignoramus)

Nothing amuses me more than to be chased by a Mother Goose with a rolling pin. And that's precisely what happened to me this morning when I woke up to see countless notifications from Quora. Veronica Curlette who is touted in her own website as 'Your On-Line English Language Teacher' posted on Quora, in reply to a question, her own analysis of a sentence that is so outrageously laughable that  I felt compelled to post a little article about it on my blog:  Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions.  That was on 4 November this year and I immediately posted the link on Quora so that Veronica could read it and realise how inadequate she is in dealing with questions on English grammar, a subject which I am persuaded she is pathetically ignorant of. After a few days, she replied on Quora and at first, I thought she was being dishonest because if she had some knowledge of grammar, she would most certainly have seen how wrong she was after reading that first article I posted. But I was wrong. She's not dishonest. She just has no knowledge of grammar.

I wrote a second article on this blog: Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2.  I wrote something brief on her Quora thread and gave a link but she must have removed my post because there is a note that says the comment was deleted. I then posted again on Quora and simply gave the link to my second article and urged her to read it. 

I thought that was the end of the matter but this morning, I was surprised to see that Veronica was hopping mad and she posted a few angry comments on her Quora thread. I don't want to write anything on her Quora thread that is more than a sentence or two because she will probably remove my post as she has already done. But from her angry posts, two things became abundantly clear to me:

1.  She really has no knowledge of English grammar - I'm speaking truthfully and I'm not taunting her, and

2.  She doesn't understand my earlier two blog posts but she can't be faulted since she has no knowledge of English grammar. I write my blog posts with the assumption that my readers are familiar with grammar. As I have always said, my blog is not a teaching blog.

Her first reply is a bit rich, coming from someone who is utterly confused between semantic and syntactic analyses (see Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2 for the details of her error). This is what she wrote: 'You need to think a bit more about form and function'. Note my reply which simply repeats that 'who' never functions as a conjunction and I tell her to read the two blog posts carefully. If you look carefully at the bottom of the post, you will see where my earlier comment was deleted by her:

Her other comments are all very short angry rebukes of me and although I am tempted to post them here, they will only take up space and they have no relevance to grammar. But there is one comment of hers which contains some references to grammar, or more accurately, her faulty understanding of grammar, which I really ought to address:

There are a few points I have to address:

1. The first point is about my blog. Veronica says my blog 'has nothing of value to an English language learner'. But I have made it very clear in my many posts that my blog is not a teaching blog. Next she says she finds my comment to my readers not to get online help on English grammar ironic 'coming from someone who is spouting grammar online'. There's nothing inconsistent between my advice and my blog. My blog does not seek to give online help on English grammar to readers. I have said it many times - my blog is not a teaching blog. My blog is a commentary on many issues that catch my fancy. I dwell a lot on language and grammar simply because there are so many ignoramuses who think they are able to teach English grammar when they are really clueless about even fundamental grammatical rules. I am pretty certain in my mind that Veronica is one such person and if you will read this entire blog post, I am sure you will agree with me.

2.  That 'many words perform many functions' is something I have never denied. Let's be clear - what I am saying is nobody who has knowledge of English grammar can possibly classify 'who' as a conjunction or can possibly say that 'who' functions as a conjunction. The dictionary definition of a 'conjunction' is correct. It is in fact a definition that I can quote verbatim. That is not in dispute. Because the dictionary definition of a 'conjunction' is correct, 'who' cannot by any stretch of the imagination be a conjunction. I have shown in Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2 that it is Veronica's flawed and very infantile understanding of the sentence structure that has led her to wrongly analyse the sentence 'He asked me who I liked' as two clauses joined by 'who' which she then wrongly classifies as a conjunction. I strongly suspect that it is her ridiculously flawed analysis of the sentence that has led her to her idiotic insistence that 'who' functions in that sentence as a conjunction.

3.  There's one insignificant point which I should mention only because it will be of help to Veronica who tends to use words she knows very little about. In Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2 I have shown that she is utterly confused between semantic and syntactic analyses and that it is beyond her meagre abilities to apply these analyses and yet she speaks of them with confidence. When someone who is touted in her own website as an online English language teacher says something utterly ridiculous (e.g. that 'who' functions as a conjunction) and she is unable to get her analysis of a simple sentence correct, a person who tells her she is wrong is not a prescriptivist. That is not how linguists use the term 'prescriptivist'. An example of a prescriptivist is one who says 'He asked me who I liked' is wrong and it should be 'He asked me whom I liked' which, incidentally, is what some of her readers on her Quora thread seem rather concerned about. I have never objected to the use of 'who' instead of 'whom'.  In my last blog post, I specifically said, 'Let's not get into the who-whom debate because that's really just a distraction.' All I wanted to show in that blog and the earlier blog Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions is that Veronica is absolutely wrong in her sentence analysis and it's raving lunacy to suggest that 'who' can function as a conjunction. That's not prescriptivism as grammarians use the word.

Among her angry comments stands one lengthier comment of hers which discloses her flawed thinking, exposes her lack of knowledge of English grammar and reveals to me that she honestly believes she is right and that she has failed to understand why I say she is wrong: 

This is a very interesting comment because readers who are knowledgeable about English grammar will certainly be able to see how hopelessly ignorant Veronica is. Nobody disagrees that 'words can function as many different parts of speech'. That is a truism all students of linguistics know. And then I read what she said to be a dictionary definition of a 'conjunction' which I have already said earlier is not in dispute. But hey, Veronica included this statement in parenthesis: 

'Such words include pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions.' 

When I first read what Veronica wrote, I asked myself if she had added that sentence herself. It definitely cannot be a part of the definition of a 'conjunction', that much I was absolutely certain. But Veronica seems to think it forms a part of the dictionary's definition of a 'conjunction' when she draws this conclusion:  

Notice that the FORM of a word does not limit its ability to change FUNCTION. 

I was fairly certain she had added those words. I could not believe any dictionary could possibly say that a conjunction included 'pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions'. No dictionary can possibly be so bonkers. So I looked up the online dictionary and I could not help laughing when it dawned on me that Veronica (our online English language teacher) does not know how to use a dictionary.  You see, that sentence is not a part of the definition. It's an illustration of how the word is used in a sentence. It's what Oxford Dictionary Online calls an 'example sentence'. If you want more examples, click on 'More example sentences' just below it and it will give you more example sentences. See this:

For Veronica's sake, I will give another example from the same dictionary and she can see what I mean. Let's take the word 'verb' and let's look at the definition followed by the first example sentence.

As you can see, 'This could be a preposition, a verb or a noun which does not in fact count as the "possessor" ' cannot be a part of the definition of a verb.  Veronica needs to learn how to use a dictionary properly. And she really needs to have a grasp of English grammar and linguistics.

But as you can see in Veronica's comment, she still believes that since 'that' in 'He thinks that Mary is clever' is a conjunction (no sane person will dispute this), 'who' in 'Mary doesn't know who John gave the present to' must also be a conjunction or that it functions as one (no sane grammarian will accept this). And please, I'm not insulting Veronica who's certainly not a grammarian but a sane grammar ignoramus. But a lot of grammar ignoramuses get very upset when they are told the truth that they don't know grammar. Veronica is a good intelligent woman who happens to have no knowledge of grammar. That's not an insult. That's the truth.  Anyone who can analyse the sentence, 'Mary doesn't know who John gave the present to' the way Veronica does cannot possibly have any knowledge of English grammar.  

Veronica also says my blog posts have 'nothing of value to an English language learner'. She says further,

You have not written anything of value about either pronouns or conjunctions. You have written a very long article which simply says that you believe I am wrong. You have not explained ANYTHING. You have not explained why you think I'm wrong. You have only said that a pronoun can't be a conjunction, when it clearly can.

But Veronica is wrong. I have explained that she is wrong. I have said repeatedly in my earlier two blog posts and in the current one that she is wrong to say that 'who' functions in that sentence as a conjunction. I have said repeatedly that her suggestion that a pronoun can function as a conjunction is outrageously wrong. I have shown in my earlier blog post that a word can be analysed in three ways - semantically, morphologically and syntactically - but it's erroneous to suggest that 'who' can be a pronoun semantically and a conjunction syntactically. I have stated that Veronica knows nothing about the different analyses. Despite all this, as I have shown in this blog post, she continues to assert that 'who' while a pronoun can function as a conjunction and has even misread a dictionary to support her crazy assertion. 

I have already said that my blog is not a teaching blog. What Veronica wants me to do is to explain to her why she is wrong. In order to do that, I must teach her the different sentence structures because the root of her problem (if my assessment of the scope of Veronica's linguistic deficiency is correct) appears to me to be her rather infantile and underdeveloped knowledge of sentence structure. But as any student of grammar knows, it's a Herculean task to teach someone the different sentence structures in the English language because there can be many different variations in a sentence. I have neither the time nor the inclination to teach people whose knowledge of grammar is zilch. There are teachers (and I am sadly not one of them) who have the patience and skill to teach students with varying degrees of competence in English grammar. I concede that my blog may not be beneficial to learners of elementary English and Veronica will forgive me if I number her among such learners. But my readers who are au fait with English grammar and linguistics will have no difficulty in following my blog posts. They don't have to be told why Veronica's errors are outrageous errors because anyone who has studied English grammar cannot help but be appalled at what she has written.