2 What grammars are and aren’t
1.2 What grammars are and aren’t
The previous section was a very quick tour of some of the parts of the mental grammar. We’ll be discovering a lot more about grammar throughout this course. Notice that we’re using the term grammar a little differently from how you might have encountered it before. Maybe your experience of grammar is as a textbook or style guide with a set of rules in it, rules that lead to consequences if you break them — you’ll lose points on your essay or get corrected with a red pen. What we’re most interested in this book is the mental grammar: the system in your mind that allows you to understand and be understood by others who know your language. Every human language has a mental grammar: that’s how the users of each language understand each other!
This is a really important idea. One way that people sometimes express ableist ideas is to deny the validity of a language by claiming that it “has no grammar”. But the truth is that all languages have grammar. All languages have a system for forming words, a way of organizing words into sentences, a systematic way of assigning meanings. Even languages that don’t have alphabets or dictionaries or published books of rules have users who understand each other; that means they have a shared system, a shared mental grammar. Using linguists’ techniques for making scientific observations about language, we can study these grammars.
The other important thing to keep in mind is that no grammar is better than any others. Maybe you’ve heard someone say, “Oh, I don’t speak real Italian, just a dialect,” implying that the dialect is not as good as so-called real Italian. Or maybe you’ve heard someone say that nobody in Newfoundland can speak proper English, or nobody in Texas speaks proper English, or maybe even nobody in North America speaks proper English and the only good English is the Queen’s English that they speak in England. From a linguist’s point of view, all languages and dialects are equally valid! There’s no linguistic way to say that one grammar is better or worse than another. This is part of what it means to study grammar from a scientific approach: scientists don’t rate or rank the things they study. Ichthyologists don’t rank fish to say which species is more correct at being a fish, and astronomers don’t argue over which galaxy is more posh. In the same way, doing linguistics does not involve assigning a value to any language or variety or dialect. We also need to acknowledge, though, that many people, including linguists, do attribute value to particular dialects or varieties, and use social judgments about language to create and reinforce hierarchies of power, privilege and status.
One of the most fundamental properties of grammar is creativity. One obvious sense of the word creative has to do with artistic creativity, and it’s true that we can use language to create beautiful works of literature. But that’s not the only way that human lang