Yeah, I think about this a lot as I've been brushing up on my Spanish lately. A lot of people are eager to come up with and apply "rules" to the grammar, but I

Yeah, I think about this a lot as I've been brushing up on my Spanish lately. A lot of people are eager to come up with and apply "rules" to the grammar, but I suspect most of these rules are post-hoc, and the way it _really_ works is largely statistical. Peter Norvig has a great discussion here[0] that asserts as much, compared to Chomsky's idea that language is based on instinctual rules. I help out on /r/EnglishLearning, and a lot of the time my answers are like, "well, I don't know why but it sounds better this way...", which makes me think of the statistical model. On the Spanish side, I recently thought about it with regard to the subjunctive mood, and in particular its use with the verbs pensar and creer (to think/believe). The upshot is that you use the indicative mood in the positive case, and subjunctive mood in the negative case (creo que estas bien / no creo que estés bien). People give lots of motivated reasons for why this is, and how in the negative case you're not "sure" of it, while in the positive case you're "sure" that you "think" it, or something like that. But ultimately, I think it's just the simple aforementioned positive/negative rule that native speakers build up over time from being exposed to sentence constructions, maybe without even realizing it, and only post-hoc rationalize why it is. [0] https://norvig.com/chomsky.html https://norvig.com/chomsky.html