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Richard Nordquist is a freelance
writer and former professor of English and Rhetoric who wrote college-level
Grammar and Composition textbooks.
Updated May 15, 2018
Mental grammar is the generative grammar stored in the brain that
allows a speaker to produce language that other speakers can
understand. It is also known as competence grammar and linguistic
competence. It contrasts with linguistic performance, which is the
correctness of actual language use according to a language's prescribed
rules.
The concept of mental grammar was
popularized by American linguist Noam Chomsky in his groundbreaking
work "Syntactic Structures" (1957). Philippe Binder and
Kenny Smith noted in "The Language Phenomenon" how important
Chomsky's work was: "This focus on grammar as a mental entity allowed enormous
progress to be made in characterizing the structure of languages." Related
to this work is Universal Grammar, or the predisposition
for the brain to learn complexities of grammar from an early age, without being
implicitly taught all the rules. The study of how the brain actually does this
is called neurolinguistics.
"One way to
clarify mental or competence grammar is to ask a friend a
question about a sentence," Pamela J. Sharpe writes in "Barron's How
to Prepare for the TOEFL IBT." "Your friend probably won't know
why it's correct, but that friend will know if it's
correct. So one of the features of mental or competence grammar is this
incredible sense of correctness and the ability to hear something that 'sounds
odd' in a language."
It's a subconscious or implicit
knowledge of grammar, not learned by rote. In "The Handbook of Educational
Linguistics," William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia note,
"A central aspect of the knowledge of a particular
language variety consists in its grammar—that is, its implicit (or
tacit or subconscious) knowledge of the rules of pronunciation (phonology), of word structure (morphology), of sentence structure (syntax), of certain aspects of meaning (semantics), and of a lexicon or vocabulary. Speakers of a
given language variety are said to have an implicit mental grammar of
that variety consisting of these rules and lexicon. It is this mental grammar
that determines in large part the perception and production of speech utterances. Since the mental grammar plays
a role in actual language use, we must conclude that it is represented in the brain
in some way.
"The detailed study of the language user's mental grammar is generally
regarded as the domain of the discipline of linguistics, whereas the study of
the way in which the mental grammar is put to use in the actual comprehension
and production of speech in linguistic performance has been a major concern
of psycholinguistics." (In
"Monolingual Language Use and Acquisition: An Introduction.")
Prior to the early 20th century and
previous to Chomsky, it wasn't really studied how humans acquire
language or what exactly in ourselves makes us different from animals, which
don't use language like we do. It was just classified abstractly that humans
have "reason," or a "rational soul" as Descartes put it,
which really doesn't explain how we acquire language—especially as babies.
Babies and toddlers don't really receive grammar instruction on how to put
words together in a sentence, yet they learn their native tongue just by
exposure to it. Chomsky worked on what it was that was special about human
brains that enabled this learning.
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ
has a website with great
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premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to
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Charge
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