Grammar with a G

[Tony A. Wright]

> Speakers don't know how their interlocutors' brains are configured.
> Communication is based on the abstract system of contrasts set up in
> the language. We react to electronically programmed simulations of
> human speech just as we would to those produced by actual people, if
> it's close enough. We read manuscripts written thousands of
> years ago, and the information is communicated, even though the brain
> that produced it has long ago been consumed by worms.
>
> That's the magic of language. The concretes don't matter.

Hear hear!  What you have written is--I think--the first sane and actually
meaningful thing to appear on FUNKNET in ages.  I think everything you have
said is implicit in the way linguists actually work.  Some are
willing to admit that they use of abstraction, and some aren't.  And then there
are those who want to be neurologists.  Frankly, while I'm sure neurology is
fascinating, abstract linguistic analysis is no less so, to me anyway.

I can't believe people want to give up linguistics for
bean counting (neuron-counting).

--Tony Wright