Edgar seems not to have quite gotten the difference I was talking about 
between _unconscious_ and _conscious_ "knowledge of grammar". Perhaps 
part of the confusion comes from different uses of the word "grammar". 
In linguistics, the word is applied to the inventory of rules for 
producing and understanding language that _all_ speakers of a language 
possess in their  _unconscious_ minds. This is knowledge that "we don't 
know we know". Here, "rule" means "pattern" -- for instance, English 
speakers unconsciously learn to put adjectives before nouns, while 
Spanish learners learn to put them after the noun. They don't have to 
be taught this.

This is very, very different from conscious knowledge that one derives 
from reading a book or taking instruction or just figuring out what the 
patterns are that one follows, as one can do with my tag-question 
challenge. (Has anybody tried that, by the way?) In lay terms, people 
think of "grammar" as being a set of rules, found in a book, which one 
can follow to produce "correct" language and avoid "mistakes".

Whether brilliant or not, all native speakers of a language "know" its 
rules, but cannot access that knowledge. They can _discover_ what is in 
that body of knowledge. But the way the brain is built does not allow 
us to "feel" or "observe" the language-making mechanism in action, just 
as we can't "feel" or "observe" what our brain is doing when we compute 
the trajectory we want a ball to follow before deciding how to make the 
throw, or when we correct ourselves in the middle of losing our balance 
to avoid a fall. These are extremely rapid, complex brain computations 
that occur below the level of conscious awareness.

For most languages, children do not need instruction to internalize the 
unconscious knowledge of language rules. The brain is built to do this, 
and will do so automatically if conditions are right. Apparently, the 
brain will even do it if some aspects of the necessary conditions are 
lacking. For instance, some deaf children in Nicaragua invented a 
signed language when they were brought together in a new school for the 
deaf, and became a community. The children had been isolated in hearing 
families before then. By the third and fourth "generation" of students 
in the school, a full-fledged human language had come into being. This 
was not done by a panel sitting down to decide what the gestures and 
meanings would be. It emerged naturally as the children expanded their 
inventory of gestures to accommodate the range of meanings they needed 
to express. (The language included grammar, or structured patterns, of 
course.)

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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