ABSTRACT
Every normal human being can talk. So the average person tends to think that there is little or nothing mysterious about language. As the linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out:
We lose sight of the need for explanation when phenomena are too familiar and ‘obvious’. We tend too easily to assume that explanations must be transparent and close to the surface . . . As native speakers, we have a vast amount of data available to us. For just this reason it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that there is nothing to be explained. Nothing could be further from the truth . . .
