Yes.

Geoff Layton
 Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 20:12:14 -0400
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Domain of Grammar
To: [log in to unmask]

"Grammar expert" has multiple senses, including but not limited to the following:

Sense 1: A grammar expert has a theoretical knowledge of the syntax of a language. Such a person is able, among other things, to parse sentences and has the knowledge necessary to teach a course in grammar.


Sense 2: A grammar expert speaks and writes a prestigious dialect in a way that most educated speakers would consider to be largely free from grammatical errors.

Sense 3: A grammar expert is someone who is able to speak and comprehend at least one dialect of a language (whether or not prestigious) and can produce sentences which conform to the operating syntactic principles of that dialect without giving conscious thought to the process of doing so. 


To my knowledge no one has ever claimed that every native speaker of a language is a grammatical expert in either of the first two sentences. On the other hand, many have claimed that every native speaker of a dialect is a grammar expert in that dialect (sense 3). The argument for the latter goes like this:


It is true that everyone (even the experts in senses 1 and 2) makes occasional performance blunders when speaking. However, they otherwise speak grammatically with little conscious effort. A speaker of a certain American dialect might say, "I ain't got none of them big green bean plants." That speaker would never say "big them bean green plants" or "them bean plants green big" or any of a dozen other combinations which could be grammatical in some other hypothetical dialect but happen not to be grammatical in theirs. While most speakers could never articulate the principles that guide their syntactic choices, they make those choices with nearly invariable precision and would instantly recognize violations by others. Because all grammars (of prestigious and non-prestigious dialects alike) are impressively complex and sophisticated, the mastery of them that native speakers have achieved qualifies them as grammar experts in sense 3.


One can simultaneously believe that very few people are grammar experts and that everyone's a grammar expert--just not in the same sense.

Dick

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