English and the native speaker

[...] How then does English work? A language is best considered as having three quite distinct aspects or dimen­sions. The dimension that usually seems most obvious, even most important, is the word-stock — also known as the vocabulary or lexis. We may think of this as our total collection of names for things: the names of actions, objects; qualities, and so on; words like assume, box, taxation, finger, sharp, table, extraordinary. The total vocabulary of English is immense and runs to about half a million items. None of us as individuals, of course, knows more than a fairly limited number of these, and uses even less, but obviously the greater our personal knowledge of vocabu­lary (the more words we recognize and the more we know how to use), the better we are able to enjoy our environ­ment and describe our experience of it.

[...] But a language cannot work with words alone. A group of words like arrive, girl, man, say cannot tell us much until we have added a second dimension, gram­mar. Grammar contributes features like articles, preposi­tions, tense, number, and the conventions of arrangement — which word goes before which. With grammar added, the four words we selected can be made to tell us something: ‘The man said that the girls had arrived’.

Grammar has done three things here. It has arranged the words in a particular order, making clear who did the saying and who the arriving. It has contributed tense by the alteration of sау to said, and number by the addition of - s to girl. Thirdly, grammar has added some additional words: the, that, the, and had. This third point raises a difficulty. We have already described the first dimension of language as ‘vocabulary’, the stock of words: now, it is being suggested that grammar also consists in part of words. At first sight, it may be confusing to find the same word, ‘words’, applied to part of grammar as well as to the whole of vocabulary. English has, in fact, two kindsof words, lexical words and grammatical words, and this basic distinction is important to learn — even if it is notvery easy to apply in some cases. [...]

The grammatical words which play so large a part in English grammar are for the most part sharply and obviously different from the lexical words, as one can see by comparing the two sets in our present example: the, that, the, had, and man, say, girl, arrive. A rough and ready difference which may seem most obvious is that grammaticalwords have ‘less meaning’, and in fact some grammarianshave called them the ‘empty’ words as opposed to the ‘full’ words of vocabulary. But this is a rather misleading way of expressing the distinction. Although a word like the is not the name of something as man is, it is very far from being meaningless; there is a sharp difference in meaning between ‘man is vile’ and ‘the man is vile’, yet the is the sole vehicle of this difference of meaning. Moreover, grammatical words differ considerably among themselves as to the amount of meaning they have, even in the lexical sense (as we may see by comparing the and should, for example). [...]

Grammatical words, then, (or ‘function’ words, as they are also called in some books) are vital signals telling us about the kind of connexion that is to be understood between lexical words. It is not that they have no meaning, but that they have a special kind of meaning, sometimes called ‘grammatical meaning’ or ‘structural meaning’. Another important characteristic is that they belong to a relatively small and permanent set of words as compared with the ‘full words’ of vocabulary. They do not come and go with changing fashions and changing ideas. In different occupations, in different places and at different periods, we tend to usevery different nouns and verbs; totalitarianism, the axis, or evacuee may be very often on our lips for a while; we may invent entirely new words like vitaminise or penicilin; we may even adopt foreign words and bandy them about freely and familiarly — blitz in the forties, sputnik in the fifties, and troika made a frequent appearance early in the sixties. Vocabulary consists of open lists of words. But we very rarely add to our stock of prepositions and pronouns, and it is equally rare for an odd one to go out of fashion. Grammatical words are in (relatively) closed lists. [...]

When we have these two aspects of English clearly understood and distinguished, we can move on to consider the third. Language can exist only if there are means of sharing it with the rest of our community. [...] Our third dimension of language is necessarily therefore the means of transmission.

The transmission of language is primarily effected through the use of our breath force as modified by organs in our throat and face to make noises, which we call our ‘pronunciation’. [...]

But while pronunciation is primary, it is by no means the only method of transmission available to us. We can use our fingers and address someone by means of the deaf-mute alphabet, we can send messages by Morse code, and above all we can write. Important as these are, however, we must remember that they are secondary and are derived — whether immediately or ultimately — from language as spoken and heard. […]