Illustrative of my claim that everyone makes performance blunders, I wrote
"a grammatical expert in either of the first two sentences" when my brain
intended "first two senses."

Dick

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:12 PM, Dick Veit <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> "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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