The English Language english language

Conceptions of Language and Grammar

Now, while our sentences may be infinite, our memories are not. Con-
sequently, our knowledge of our language, our competence, cannot be just
a set of sentences. It must be a finite set of devices that allow us to create
or understand sentences as we need to. Thus we can produce and under-
stand an indefinite number of sentences that we have never heard or uttered
before. We do this, partially, by matching what we hear with the rules of
language that we keep in our heads.

Exercise

1. Reread several pages of this chapter and list the sentences that you
   had read or heard before reading it the first time. We are confident
   that your list will be either empty or very short. What does this fact
   tell you about how you made sense of the sentences that you had never
   encountered before?


2. Briefly explain and illustrate with at least one appropriate example
   each of the following concepts:
   a. Metalinguistic meaning
   b. The arbitrariness of the relation between words and their mean-
   ings
   c. Linguistic competence
   d. Linguistic performance
   e. The infinity of language

approaches to the study of language

Prescriptive and descriptive viewpoints
Prescriptive grammarians are mainly concerned with the conventions that
govern formal, written communication. Their goal is to maintain a stan-
dardized variety of a language so that it can function as the variety used
for communication by the major domains of a state (such as education,
government, commerce, and law), as well as among people separated by
great distances, by great cultural differences, and by considerable spans of
time. This requires a set of widely accepted conventions that are codified in
grammars, dictionaries, and style manuals. These conventions are designed
with the goal of ensuring that people using the standard variety will use the
same forms in the same ways and with the same meanings, thus presumably