The Myth of G

[H Stephen Straight]

        Elizabeth Bates may already regret her (9 Mar 1999) remark that "No one
is denying that grammars exist".   Although Greg Thomson and Carl Mills (10 Mar
1999) have already responded to it insightfully and correctly, Tony Wright's
retort, in which parts of speech and agreement and clitics prove the existence
of a body of rules or other such propositional stores mediating between the
analysis of input and the creation of output, makes me see that more is
needed.  For even when defined as "a skill that correct maps between form and
meaning" (which Liz offers as a way to disassociate herself from the worst
formalist excesses of the genre) or as "social RULES or conventions, which are
known by (intersubjectively
valid) linguistic intuition" (which Esa Itkonen offers as a necessary albeit
"hypothetical" component of linguistic theory), the concept of a "grammar" as a
component of language knowledge deserves to be laid to rest forever.
        The most recent of my litany of arguments in favor of this premise
appears in the paper I presented at LACUS Forum XXV last July, to appear in the
proceedings later this year under the title "Central Aphasia and the Myth of G:
Toward a Grammar-Free Linguistics".  In brief, a "dialectical-processual" view
of language knowledge rejects any and all characterizations of language
knowledge as rules, propositions, constraints, elements, nodes, or other such
entities presumed to be neutral to, for example, the fundamental dichotomy
between the primes of perceptual and motoric functioning.  These and other
arguments against a processually neutral view of language objects as
"structural" abstractions may not make linguists' work any easier but they may
succeed in making it less mystical than recent (read the last 50 years of)
linguistic research have made it.


                Best.           'Bye.           Steve