Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 2

In my last blog post, Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions, I wrote about the ludicrous errors made by Veronica Curlette, a Canadian English language teacher, in her online post on Quora. I posted a link to my blog post on her Quora post in the hope that she could see how inadequate her knowledge of English grammar really is. I have met many people who think that they understand English grammar just because they speak the language. They mistake their ability to speak a language for a knowledge of its grammar. Many people do not understand that there may be a huge chasm separating the two. I had hoped that Veronica will realise her own linguistic deficiency and will stop making incorrect pronouncements on English grammar. But her brief reply a few days ago on Quora tells me that she has not learnt the value of saying nothing when she knows nothing. This is what she writes in reply to me: 

People who are ignorant of grammar and linguistics are usually hopelessly confused when they try to grapple with the subtle distinction between a semantic analysis and a syntactic analysis and Veronica's confusion is very much to be expected. That she is prepared to even mention something that she's utterly confused about only goes to show how little she heeds Pope's admonition that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

Veronica's error is not only confined to her confusion between the two terms - she says 'semantic' when she means 'syntactic' and the other way round. She also has totally no understanding of what these criteria mean. I am loath to mention here the different criteria in the analysis of a sentence because they have absolutely no bearing on Veronica's mistakes which I wrote about in my last blog post. But if I don't talk about these criteria and show you why she is talking rubbish, you will give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she isn't really wrong after all. This is the usual ploy a grammar ignoramus comes up with when his errors are shown to him. He makes a remark that he himself and most readers don't understand and he hopes that's the end of the matter. But to me, it's very important that people who are wrong are shown to be wrong even if they are not prepared to admit their mistakes.

There are 3 criteria that linguists use for the classification of a word: semantic, morphological and syntactic. All of them are useful in different ways but they do NOT contradict one another. For example, the head of an adjective phrase may be syntactically analysed as a premodifier of a noun but it is still an adjective. It doesn't become something else. It is not transformed into a verb syntactically when it's an adjective semantically. That's not how English grammar works. What Veronica says shows a complete breakdown in her understanding of semantic and syntactic analyses. 'Who' does not become a conjunction when analysed semantically, morphologically or syntactically.  It always is a pronoun.  

I hope my readers can now see that what Veronica writes above is complete nonsense. Why then does she respond in this bizarre way? I can guess what must have gone on in her mind that led to her frenzied mangling of English grammar.  First let's look at the original question asked on Quora:

It is obvious from this question that the person asking the question probably comes from a country where English is a foreign language. Anyone who speaks English habitually should be able to answer this question. The correct sentence is of course 'He asked me who(m) I liked'. Let's not get into the who-whom debate because that's really just a distraction.

That is the answer Veronica should have given and it is the answer any English-speaking child would have given. Neither Veronica nor the child should venture into an area that is completely murky and impenetrable to them - English grammar.  

But alas, Veronica, instead of just giving the correct sentence without further comment, takes it upon herself despite her abysmal ignorance of English grammar to analyse the sentence and in doing so, goes out of her depth. Her knowledge of sentence structure is elementary - she can only see the SVO structure and nothing else. So she sees the sentence as two sets of SVOs. She mulls over this and vaguely recalls something that she must have been taught in kindergarten - a conjunction is capable of joining two clauses. Hey presto! She turns 'who' into a conjunction that joins 'He asked me' to 'I liked'. But English grammar is not something you can conjure up with your bag of magic tricks. You can't invent your own rules and make up your own classifications that fly in the face of standard grammar. Nobody who has the faintest knowledge of English grammar can possibly make such an outrageous mistake. And yet, on her personal website, she is touted as 'Your On-line English Language Teacher'. I can only hope that she doesn't post on her own website the same rubbish she's posted on Quora.

I really hope people will stop getting online help on English grammar. There are far too many grammar ignoramuses peddling their half-baked ideas of what 'correct' grammar really is when they can't even tell, for instance, a pronoun from a conjunction. 

NOTE: Veronica has just made a comment at the bottom of this post and I have posted my reply here:  Pronouns Aren't Conjunctions Part 3 (or Hell hath no fury like a woman who's told she is a grammar ignoramus)