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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: What is Grammar?
In-Reply-To: dford@solfopro.com's message of Thu, 08 Aug 1996 20:57:41 GMT
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Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 17:17:10 GMT
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In article <4udkbe$iqg@goodnews.voicenet.com> dford@solfopro.com (David Ford)
writes:

>Specifically, this person was saying that the icons used in airports to
>indicate lavatories and restaurants, etc, can't make up a language, because
>they don't have a grammar.

>This made me think about Chinese, which I believe originally started with
>ideograms, and, as I understand it, developed so that each word can be used as
>a subject, or verb, or object, or adjective, depending on context.

Actually, Chinese started out as a spoken language which began to be written
with logograms in the 3rd millenium BCE.  The usage of the written language
follows that of the spoken language.  (All right, that's somewhat simplified:
the spoken language of several hundred years ago, although that is in process
of being reformed.)

>What does grammar consist of?

Depends on the school you went to. ;->  Seriously, this is an area of intense
study, and has been for the last half century.  Before that, we all "knew" what
grammar was:  A list of rules, and examples thereof.

>How do you know whether it is there?

Because you can devise tests for native speakers of a language that will elicit
value judgments on utterances from them.

>Can you have a language without grammar?

No.

>Grammar seems to imply more than word order.

Again, depends on what school you attended.

>Does it not tell us how to make sense out of words that are placed near each
>other, or in a given context?

See my earlier answer.

>How does it work?

This is one of the most hotly debated issues in the entire study.

>Is it a set of rules that tell us how to create meaning from words?

See my earlier answer.

>Can the airport signs be said to have a grammar?

No.  Not in any interesting sense.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
