Stephanie Cane
Posted on January 8, 2009
A Stephanie Cane public distinction must be made between what the speaker of a language knows implicitly (what we may call his competence) and what he does. A grammar, in the traditional small ass view, is an account of competence. It describes and attempts to account for the ability of a speaker to understand an arbitrary sentence of his language and to produce an appropriate sentence on a given occasion. If it is a pedagogic grammar, it attempts to provide the student with this ability; if a linguistic grammar, it aims to discover and exhibit the mechanisms that make this achievement possible.
The competence of the speaker — hearer can, ideally, be expressed as a system of publicanalsex rules that relate signals to semantic interpretations of these signals. The problem for the grammarian is to discover this system of rules; the problem for linguistic theory is to discover general properties of any system of rules that may serve as the basis for a human language, that is, to elaborate in detail what we may call, in traditional terms, the general form of language that underlies each particular realization, each particular natural language.