Grammar. If you ask the average speaker of a language what they know about grammar they may remember the odd lesson from school

If you ask the average speaker of a language what they know about grammar they may remember the odd lesson from school, but beyond that they will say that they have forgotten what grammar they once knew. The same speaker, however, can say a sentence like ‘ If I had known, I’d have come earlier’ without thinking, even though it is grammatically complex.

Linguists have been investigating the native speaker’s knowledge for years, just as they have been trying to think of the best way of describing that knowledge and the grammatical system. What they have found is that the grammatical system is rule-based and that competent users of the language ‘know’ these rules in some way. An example from the most famous work in this respect by Noam Chomskywill show both a method of description and how grammar rules allow us to generate language. If we take a simple sentence ‘ The boy kicked the dog’ we can give it the following formulation. This formulation tells us that the sentence (S) contains a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). The noun phrase contains a determiner (D) and a noun (N). The verb phrase contains a verb (V) and another noun phrase.

We may represent this sentence with a tree-diagram like this:

S

NP VP

V NP

D N D N

The boy kicked the dog

What is important here is that this diagram does demonstrate the grammar of one sentence. The realisation of this grammar is not important for our purposes. But what is interesting is that if we slot bits of vocabulary into this tree, or frame, we get a sentence. By changing the bits of vocabulary we get completely different sentences. E.g., ‘ The girl loved the man’, ‘The artist painted the nude’, ‘The American ate the cheeseburger’, etc. In other words, the sentence has changed but the rule has stayed the same.

We can go further than this. Competent English speakers also know that these active sentences can easily be transformed into passive ones to give us ‘ The dog was kicked by the boy’.

What seems to be the case is that all competent language users know these rules. This largely subconscious knowledge consists of a finite number of rules with which it is possible to create an infinite number of sentences. Our one example alone could generate literally thousands of sentences. A moment’s reflection will convince us that we will never be able to say all the possible sentences of the language. We will not even approach that number, for, with the huge range of vocabulary at our disposal, it would just not be possible. And yet we all subconsciously know the grammar of our language otherwise we wouldn’t be able to string any sentences together at all.

A distinction has to be drawn between what we know and how that knowledge is used to construct sentences. Chomskycalled these concepts competence (knowledge) and performance (the realisation of this knowledge as sentences). So, our average native speakers who say they do not know grammar are both right and wrong. They do not consciously know any grammar and could not produce any rules of grammar without study and thought. But they do have a language competence which is subconscious and which allows them to generate grammatically correct sentences.