Grammar with a "G"

Greg Thomson gthomson at GPU.SRV.UALBERTA.CA
Thu Mar 18 18:04:08 UTC 1999


At 15:04 -0700 03-16-1999, Lise Menn wrote:
>... the diversity of 'grammar(s)'
>in the brain does not mean that the different aspects of grammatical
>knowledge are totally disconnected. ...
>        Whether G has lost its usefulness as an abstraction, I would
>argue, depends on the level of detail at which one is working; if you are
>describing an underdocumented language, it would be most unreasonable to
>demand a separate account of what people 'know' in each of our currently
>available ways of assessing knowledge, but if you are modeling brain
>damage or language acquisition, then it is essential to attempt just that.
>But in doing so, the intense cross-talk and interaction between the
>different types of grammatical knowledge is a baby not to be discarded
>with the bathwater.


I liked (sort of) Gerry Altmann's comparision of linguists' descriptions of
grammars with the periodic table in Chemistry. Regarding the latter, it is
interesting to see that substances combine in certain proportions,
resulting in certain "regular" properties. But what is behind all of that?
That is far more interesting. So also, descriptions of formal regularities
in languages can be fun and fascinating, but then comes the "so what?" All
those patterns in the spoken or written production would be there even if
no linguist looked at them, and they aren't there just too look nice.
"Grammar" is _doing_ something, and that's what's ultimately interesting.
Leaving linguistics aside for a minute, we can consider a familiar
illusion: the illusion of directly perceiving a speaker's thoughts. What I
mean is, language users listening to speech are often (perhaps, typically)
rather unaware of linguistic form as they subjectively "grasp" something
else. How does linguistic (ultimately acoustic) form cause that to happen
so well and so rapidly? And in what does that "happening" consist? Recall
Givon's suggestion that we move on to "reinterpret grammar as mental
processing instructions". How are concepts (let's say, those involved in a
particular flow of narrative understanding) constructed and managed? Well,
"grammars", including those of yet-to-be-documented languages, are an
enormous source of evidence bearing on that more interesting question, to
the extent that we use them for that purpose. Meanwhile, we still come back
to the unlikeliness that a  model of the external form of a language will
turn out to be a useful model of anything inside the language user.

Regards,
Greg

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Greg Thomson, Ph.D. Candidate (gthomson at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca)
SIL/Thomson, Westpost P.O. Box 109, FIN 53101,
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Phone: 7-812-246-35-48 (in St. Petersburg, Russia)



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