On 09 Feb 2005, at 7:07 AM, dhbailey wrote:
Richard Yates wrote:
Oooh, good one!Do you consciously think about grammar when you speak? Is grammar significant to communication? - Darcy
Can someone communicate effectively without having consciously learned the rules of grammar specifically (as opposed to picking up general concepts of communication)? Certainly, children do it all the time!
That was kind of my point, David.
[Except that children don't "pick up general concepts of communication" -- they learn language by fitting the incoming linguistic data into their innate concept of grammatical strucutre. Children notice and apply rules like "the regular plural form in English adds an "s" to the end of the word" long before they have the linguistic and cognitive tools to explain what they are doing. If children had to start from zero and simply deduce the existence of language, then words, then combinatorial grammar, then nouns and verbs and modifiers, then the specific grammatical rules of their native language, they'd never learn to speak.]
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
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