Week 3: Sentences, etc.

This week, I feel as if the concepts we have been learning in class finally connected to real life. I guess all the things we've been discussing have, but this week it seemed particularly obnoxious (in a good way). During the grammar/income exercise on the first day, I took notes on the difference between "lay" and "lie," because that's one thing I never understood. I always relied upon the “People lie, things lay” rule, but I took that to mean, literally, you can only use “lie” when it applies to humans. Dumb.

But anyway, this past week I was writing something where I had to use "lay" because "recline" wouldn't work. From my notes, I knew that the correct sentence structure would be, “I lay in bed," (context implies that it’s past tense) but I didn't understand why until the class period during which we discussed sentence patterns. Brushing up on transitive and intransitive verbs--something I’m now pretty sure that I never learned in the first place--made it clear that you can only use “lie” without an object, and “lay” requires an object. I’m still a little hazy, though. The model I wrote down on the first day was this:

I lie in my bed.

Last night, I lay in my bed.

I have lain in my bed.

I lay the pencil down.

I laid it down.

I have laid the pencil down.

So is “lay” not only a transitive verb, but also just the past tense form of “lie”? I guess that makes sense, now that I think about it. Still, I’m not sure if I’m just inventing rules to fit with what I see or not.

Another thing I’ve learned is that you really can’t use the reflexive case without the subjective. I was taught that in tenth grade, but then when I took English 101, the professor went on this strange tirade about how it wasn’t only improper but completely redundant; you yourself do not need to use the reflexive to add emphasis, because the subjective itself tells you what the subject is. Dunno. I sometimes like to do it anyway, just to spite her (probably one of the worst learning experiences I’ve had, to date). But was she right? Is this something else that is trending out?

AND I REALLY LIKED PARSING SENTENCES, TOO. I diagrammed sentences once, in one grammar class, but this was infinitely simpler. Doing (sometimes complex) real-world examples also helped. It seems like teacher-generated examples are kind of hit or miss. It’s easy to create sentences that go right by the book, but looking for S-V-O sentences in a newspaper gave us the chance to identify tricky sentences, and not just the basic ones (which are good for an introduction, but if we hadn’t done the newspaper exercise, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t understand sentence structure as well as I do now).

Questions:
1. Do I have this lay/lie thing straight? If not, what am I missing?
2. How do you feel about reflexive pronouns? Was my professor right, or just picky?