Grammar with a "G"

[Tony A. Wright]

At 09:43 AM 3/22/99 -0600, Sydney M Lamb wrote:

>If grammar "is just the observed regularities of collections of examples"
>then it is the grammarian and not the speaker of the language that you are
>talking about.

If I give the mechanic an account of my car's behavior, namely that it dies
out any time I let my foot off the gas, which I formalize using the
following rule:

     dies /   [- accelerator] __________   (dies immediately following an
environment                                                negatively-specified for
accelerator pressure).

is my account of my car's behavior really only about me, and not about the
car in any sense?   I could formalize my car's behavior in many ways.  All
of these would certainly say much about me and my penchant for branching
nodes, arrows, brackets, etc.   But at the core, these formalisms would all
equate to "dies when I let off the gas," which let's suppose  is exactly,
for whatever reason, what the car does, with not a single counter-example.

 True, my account is merely observationally adequate, lacking as I do any
understanding of what is going on (or what ever goes on) under the hood of
a car.  The car is really largely a black box to me, I can assure you.

Does this mean that my account, either the formal or informal version, says
nothing about the car and only reflects my methodology and formalism of
car-problem analysis?  I note that my mechanic insists on my
observationally-adequate account of my car's behavior before he will even
begin looking at it.

--Tony Wright