Grammar and Natural Language

Frederick J. Newmeyer
Professor of Linguistics, Dept. Linguistics,
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

A number of different approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users' sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elements, and the great disparity between sentences that grammars generate and speakers' actual utterances.

This talk defends the classical position. It provides evidence from a number of sources that speakers mentally represent full grammatical structure, however fragmentary their utterances might be. The talk also questions the relevance of most corpus-based frequency studies to models of individual grammatical competence. It goes on to propose a scenario for the origins and evolution of language which helps to explain why grammar and usage are as distinct as they are.