Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Wordsthe speaker’s head to enable them to do this. As you can imagine, this is not always
easy and there is a lot of room for differences of opinion. Some of us might tell you
that that is exactly what makes linguistics interesting.
There are however some things we can assume from the outset about the linguistic
system without even looking too closely at the details of language. First, it seems that
speakers of a language are able to produce and understand a limitless number of
expressions. Language simply is not a confined set of squeaks and grunts that have
fixed meanings. It is an everyday occurrence that we produce and understand
utterances that probably have never been produced before (when was the last time you
heard someone say the bishop was wearing a flowing red dress with matching high
heeled shoes and singing the Columbian national anthem? – yet you understood it!).
But if language exists in our heads, how is this possible? The human head is not big
enough to contain this amount of knowledge. Even if we look at things like brain cells
and synapse connections, etc., of which there is a very large number possible inside the
head, there still is not the room for an infinite amount of linguistic knowledge. The
answer must be that this is not how to characterise linguistic knowledge: we do not
store all the possible linguistic expressions in our heads, but something else which
enables us to produce and understand these expressions. As a brief example to show
how this is possible, consider the set of numbers. This set is infinite, and yet I could
write down any one of them and you would be able to tell that what I had written was a
number. This is possible, not because you or I have all of the set of numbers in our
heads, but because we know a small number of simple rules that tell us how to write
numbers down. We know that numbers are formed by putting together instances of the
ten digits 0,1,2,3, etc. These digits can be put together in almost any order (as long as
numbers bigger than or equal to 1 do not begin with a 0) and in any quantities.
Therefore, 4 is a number and so is 1234355 , etc. But 0234 is not a number and neither
is qewd. What these examples show is that it is possible to have knowledge of an
infinite set of things without actually storing them in our heads. It seems likely that
this is how language works.
So, presumably, what we have in our heads is a (finite) set of rules which tell us
how to recognise the infinite number of expressions that constitute the language that
we speak. We might refer to this set of rules as a grammar, though there are some
linguists who would like to separate the actual set of rules existing inside a speaker’s
head from the linguist’s guess of what these rules are. To these linguists a grammar is
a linguistic hypothesis (to use a more impressive term than ‘guess’) and what is inside
the speaker’s head IS language, i.e. the object of study for linguistics. We can
distinguish two notions of language from this perspective: the language which is
internal to the mind, call it I-language, which consists of a finite system and is what
linguists try to model with grammars; and the language which is external to the
speaker, E-language, which is the infinite set of expressions defined by the I-language
that linguists take data from when formulating their grammars. We can envisage this
as the following: