Delahunty and Garvey
minutive (-ling in (1a)), you know that duckling and snorkeling have two
meaningful parts but that Kipling has only one. You also know the gram-
matical form and function of snorkeling in (1b), though you might not be
able to provide a technical description. (See our chapters on Phrases, Basic
Clause Patterns, and Multi-clause Sentences.) Knowing a language, then,
is not the same as knowing terminology or being able to articulate gram-
matical descriptions. Your knowledge of language is unconscious knowl-
edge. No amount of introspection, meditation, psychotherapy, or brain
surgery will allow you to access it directly.
The clearest sign of unconscious knowledge is the presence of linguistic
intuitions—gut feelings about language that we could not have without un-
conscious linguistic knowledge. These intuitions are not the product of educa-
tion; totally illiterate people have them. They derive from genetic capacities
specific to humans and from having acquired a language. One’s unconscious
knowledge of language is called linguistic competence We will have more to
say about linguistic competence below.
A language consists of rules
Unfortunately, the word rule conjures up exactly the wrong image of lin-
guistic knowledge, suggesting the prescriptions of right and wrong that we
find in handbooks. Linguists, however, use the word to mean two related
ideas. First, A rule is a part of our unconscious knowledge of our language (our
linguistic competence). It is a mental pattern about a limited part of a language,
e.g., pronunciation, sentence structure, or what a word means. For instance,
English has a basic subject-verb-object word order:
(2) a. [SubjectPatti] [Verbplays] [Objectthe cello].
b. [SubjectMichael] [Verbwrote] [Objectsome fine poetry].When we produce sentences of this sort, we are acting as if we were following
a rule that says: Put subjects before verbs and verbs before objects. If we were not
following rules, our speech would be chaotic and unintelligible, not the highly
patterned, communicative activity it is.
Second, linguists also use the word rule to refer to their attempts to for-
mulate these linguistic patterns in words, that is, to the model we build of
an unconscious mental rule. Our model is not the rule itself, which remains
forever inaccessible.