Grammar
In speaking or comprehending a language, people implicitly conform to a system that relates sounds to meanings. This has traditionally been called the grammar of the language. In speaking or understanding French, for example, people adhere to the conventions of the french language about wich combinations of words convey which meaning. Chien means "dog" and C'ets un chien means "that is a dog," These conventions are said to be described by the grammar of french. This view of a grammar is a far cry from the dull prescriptive rules most people are tought about what is and what is not "good grammar." The grammar of french is insrended to be a complete description of the language as it is actually spoken.
What does a grammar look like? Recently, especially under the influence of Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky, many linguistis have argued that a grammar is a system of rules (see bach, 1974; Akmajian and Heny, 1975). The rules for English, for example, have the capability of "generating" all the legitimate sentences of english and no illegitimate ones. They can generate The sun is shining, but not Sun the shining is. One rule in English states that for the and sun to form a " noun phrase," they must be ordered the sun and not sun the, while another rule states that for is and shining to from a "verb phrase," they must be ordered is shinning and not shining is. There are grammatical rules to deal with there major aspects of language:
- Phonology: the sounds and their structure
- Syntax: the way wards combine to form sentences
- Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences.
Taken together, the rules from a complex system that is supposed to capture all aspects of language structure. This, of course, is only an ideal, for so far only partial grammars have been worked out for english and some other languages. What makes the grammar important for the psychology of language is the possibility that it will help in the study of speaking and listening. Grammatical rules, in effect, summarize regularities in the behavior of people speaking a language. Consider this approximate rule for the strukture of english noun phrases: As this rulc states, people say the gazelle, an aardvark, and a toad, but not gazelle the, aardvark an, and toad a. This rule summarizes a regularity in people's productions of noun phrases, and the ideal grammar of english would summarize facts about behavior, they should surely help in the study of that behavior-in the study of speaking and listening. From the traditional point of view, grammatical rules should also take us a long way toward understanding the fundamental laws of thought and the nature of the human intellect. Noam chomsky (1965,1968) has tried to make much of this explicit in his discussion of competence and perfomance.
