Knowledge of grammar

 Language is everywhere around us. The ability to use language is a basic skill that we are all endowed with to live as human beings. It is hard to imagine how one could live without some form of language. But we tend to take things around us for granted, as if there is nothing particularly remarkable about our species-specific ability to use language. In our study of linguistics, we try not to take things for granted. In linguistics, we try to make careful observations about language, pose questions about those observations, make hypotheses to explain them, test the validity of those hypotheses, and revise, confirm or extend those hypotheses. Such activities of research are typical of the natural sciences.

--sunrise, sunset

--metal color, Max Planck, quantum physics

--apple dropping, gravity

--other things taken for granted

Indeed, we take linguistics to be a science, like any of the natural sciences. Although the subject matter of linguistics does not concern natural phenomena (which are the subject matters of the "hard sciences"), but deals with humanistic and social phenomena, the approach we take is no different from that of a natural science.

What goal do we have in the study of language as a scientific subject matter? Noam Chomsky, the architect of modern linguistics, says that language is a mirror of the mind. In this course, we use language as a probe into the nature of the human mind. By studying the nature of human language, we gain valuable insights into one important aspect of human cognition.

Object of inquiry about knowledge of language.

Content, acquisition, and use. What are the things we observe about language that we try to explain? There are at least three kinds of linguistic phenomena that are remarkable enough to call for an explanation. First, we possess a remarkable amount of knowledge of our language(s), which allows us to communicate with others in a theoretically unlimited way: that is, we can understand utterances that we have never heard before, say sentences we never used before, etc. (as will be illustrated in more detail below). Although our experiences seem vastly different, the knowledge we have about our language clearly must be sufficiently the same among us to allow for successful communication to take place. Finding out what the content of that knowledge is and characterizing it in the most appropriate way is the primary concern of (core) theoretical linguistics. Secondly, we as human beings seem to acquire the knowledge about our language(s) with remarkable speed and efficiency. Typically, children gain control of most of the essential aspects of their language in 2-3 years by the age of 5-6. This is extremely remarkable especially given the highly complex nature of linguistic knowledge (as we shall see in the rest of this course) and the limited experience the child has been exposed to. [......] Thirdly, we can distinguish between the content of our linguistic knowledge and its use (between our linguistic competence and linguistic performance.) Our linguistic knowledge (competence) is theoretically unlimited, but our use of it (comprehension and production) is limited.

b. Tacit knowledge and formal knowledge. Most of our linguistic knowledge is tacit, and it's the kind we tend to take for granted. As a linguist, we try to characterize that tacit knowledge in a formal way, so that our unconscious knowledge of a layman becomes the conscious knowledge of an educated specialist.

c. Components of grammar. Throughout this course, our concern will be with the content of our linguistic knowledge. When we hear people say that a person knows a language, we shall say that he/she possesses the grammar of his/her language. For the convenience of description, and justified on extensive empirical grounds, a grammar can be divided into several components, or modules. The elementary divisions of a grammar are a syntax, a semantics, and a phonology. [......] There is also a component of morphology, dealing with the structure of words.