> On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:30:41 -0400
> Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Isn't the fundamental assumption here that kids learn to speak in
> > grammatically correct sentences? Half of the college students I've
> taught
> > at Research I and II universities - and more at the second tier small
> > college I taught at, don't speak or write in grammatically correct
> > sentences... is this a problem for the theory?
>
> Nope. You're thinking of schoolmarm prescriptive grammar (don't
> say "ain't", don't say "axed" instead of "asked", etc.) rather than
> a linguist's descriptive sense of the term. What linguists mean about
> "grammar" is whatever it is that enables us to say that utterances
> like "The girl that Jack dated her dumped him" is ill-formed, and it's
> ill-formed because "her" doesn't belong there.
>
> Not that sentences like this don't actually occur all the time -- that's
> part of the poverty-of-stimulus problem. It's that native speakers
> of English, regardless of dialect, will know that something is wrong --
> that a mistake has been made, or that the speaker somehow changed
> horses in midstream (anacoluthon is the technical term).
Oh, so... despite all the differences in languages the fact that all languages have grammar implies that there's a real universal grammar rooted in brain structures rather than in the seemingly circular character of the abstraction? Geertz woulda had a field day with this, it may be universal but its so indeterminate as to make the universal meaningless...