ABSTRACT
Linguists are sometimes accused of being ‘too abstract’ and ‘removed from reality’. For example, one reviewer has condemned ‘that celestial unintelligibility which is the element where the true student of linguistics normally floats and dances’ (Philip Toynbee, The Observer). Yet almost all linguists, not just psycholinguists, are trying to find out about a speaker’s mental ‘grammar’ – the internalized set of ruleswhich enables someone to speak and understand their language. As Chomsky noted:
The linguist constructing a grammar of his language is in effect proposing a hypothesis concerning this internalized system.
