Patty,

To help clarify your question about "rules", you need to distinguish 
between two kinds of knowledge – ability to do something complex 
without having to think through the steps, vs. the ability to describe 
how something is done. With regard to language, this is often described 
as the difference between being able to _talk_ (speak and understand 
language automatically) and being about to _talk ABOUT_ language.

Everyone who has normal language ability (and that is nearly everyone) 
in whatever language has the first kind of "knowledge", which I prefer 
to think of as "ability". The second kind, conscious knowledge of the 
definitions of terms like "subject", or the ability to identify the 
direct object of a sentence and call it that, has to be consciously 
learned, either by self-teaching from books or experimentation or by 
being taught by someone else.

Both kinds of knowledge consist of rules: the word "rule" in 
linguistics doesn't refer so much to a "do-don't" type rule, like rules 
of etiquette, but rather just a fixed pattern for creating a certain 
linguistic element, like a sentence or a phrase. In English, the verb 
usually comes between the subject and other material in the sentence; 
in Japanese, the verb is always at the end of the sentence, with the 
subject first, and things like direct objects in between.

I often explain it this way: think of a swimming coach explaining to a 
trainee how to execute an efficient stroke. The coach is talking 
_about_ swimming, not doing it. When you chuck an infant into deep 
water and it swims (and they do, up to a certain age), it is using its 
unconscious ability to swim. The kid can't talk at all yet, let alone 
talk _about_ anything, and nobody taught it to swim. It is operating by 
instinct. There is something instinctual about language learning; what 
linguists are arguing about is the degree to which language has 
instincts (and, literally, brain parts) reserved only for it, which 
dictate which structures are possible in language, or whether 
more-general cognitive abilities (such as the ability to generalize 
over a range of similar experiences, or to switch between having an 
object in the foreground and in the background, like the "faces/vase" 
diagrams) are used to develop knowledge of language.

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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