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Grammars for people

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

David Lightfoot
David Lightfoot
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland
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Extract

TWO VIEWS OF GRAMMAR

For many years, many people have used the term ‘grammar’ to indicate something which represents an individual's mature linguistic capacity and which arises in the mind/brain of that individual on exposure to some relevant childhood experience. The grammar interacts with other aspects of a person's mental make-up, in a modular conception of mind. Different experiences may give rise to different grammars in different individuals, but it is a plausible initial assumption that grammars arise in everybody in the same way, subject to the same principles, parameters and learning constraints, which are common to the species. This is a biological view of grammars. Countless questions arise about these grammars, about their internal properties, about how they are represented in brains, about how they emerge in young children. Under this view there is no grammar of English, rather various grammars which exist in the minds of English speakers; grammars hold of people and not of languages. Let us distinguish terminology from reality here: proponents of the biological view of grammars sometimes use ‘the grammar of French’ to refer to the grammars of French speakers in a kind of shorthand which abstracts away from individual variation. This usage may have been misleading but, as noted in Lightfoot (1991, henceforth HSP, 162), it is comparable to references to the French liver, the American brain, or the Irish wit; nobody believes that there is such an entity but sometimes it is a convenient abstraction.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , September 1995 , pp. 393 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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