Oh my word!

W e’re going to get a little bit technical this week and talk about nativism versus tabula rasa.

Every time you speak or write you choose whether to express yourself in first, second or third person. That sounds more complicated than it really is. The words “me” and “I” are first-person pronouns. They are words used by people when talking about themselves: “I like chocolate.” The second person pronoun is “you”, as in: “You like chocolate”.

When speaking or writing in the third person our phrase becomes: “They like chocolate.” It could be “he”, “she” or “it”, depending on how you wish to put it.

But none of the above really matters in everyday life. You don’t pause before speaking to decide whether to talk in first, second or third person. You just speak. You don’t even think about it.

It is easy, so easy that toddlers appear to do it naturally. They never get their terminology wrong when expressing: “Me want chocolate”. Yet no one explains first, second and thirdperson pronouns to them.

There is a set of ideas about this, nativist theories, which have it that children are born with an ability to organise the language they hear, allowing them to very rapidly learn fairly complicated concepts like I, you, them, despite the fact their brains haven’t fully developed. The opposite view is the tabula rasa theory (it is Latin for clean slate), which holds that humans are born with no built-in mental content and all knowledge comes from experience and observation. There is widespread, and very interesting, scientific debate over this. Going back to our sentence, it is perhaps surprising, then, that if it is made only slightly more complicated many grown-ups get it wrong. Should it be: “Bob and I like chocolate” or “Bob and me like chocolate”?

It is, of course, “Bob and I”, but you’ll find many people who’d say “Bob and me”.

The easy way to discern what is right is to take out the extra material and see how the sentence sounds. Without “Bob and”, you wouldn’t say: “me like chocolate”.

You knew that. You instantly recognise a correctly-phrased sentence. There’s no need to go into detail on first, second and thirdperson phrasing, or the subjects and objects of sentences. If it’s right, it sounds right. I think this is a point in favour of the nativism argument, but you’ll make up your own mind.