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, Observer). Yet almost all linguists, not just psycholinguists, are trying to fmd out about a speaker’s mental ‘grammar’ - the internalized set of rules which enables someone to speak and understand their language. As Chomsky notes:
The linguist constructing a grammar of his language is in effect proposing a hypothesis concerning this internalized system.
