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Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and li
by brenschluss 11y ago
Let's make it complicated, then: if you're great at walking a tightrope on a windy day, is your brain storing a model of your muscular+skeletal structure and live-computing a kinematics physics model + wind simulation to simulate how you should be walking across that tightrope?
My point was that Newton's formulas are simplified models of how the world works. As a result, just because you know how to throw a ball doesn't mean you "know" Newton's formulas. Similarly, just because you know how to speak doesn't mean you "know" grammar.
The question to ask to help us answer this question would be: is grammar a simplified model of language?[1]
[1] This depends on whether you're a linguistic prescriptivist or descriptivist.
- mbrock 11y agoI don't think that question has that much to do with prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivists want to use the study of grammar to uphold certain linguistic norms; descriptivists find that language works fine without expert supervision; neither is a stance on the scientific origin of linguistic structure. You could be a prescriptivist and believe that grammar is a simplified model: you would just want that model to carry normative weight (e.g. for conservative reasons, or to promote standardized national language, or whatever reason).