linguistic structures - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland ...

acquire a native language because there is an infinite number of grammatical and ungrammatical
sentences in every human language. In addition, even when native speakers have expert, fluent
knowledge of grammatical principles, they can’t share this knowledge with their children because
children are unable to comprehend even the most elementary statements about grammar. Most of
one’s native language is acquired before one possesses the cognitive skills to discuss the
grammatical principles which underlie the ability. For example, kindergartners clearly know the
difference between statements and questions before their first day of school, yet none can discuss
the difference in principled terms that reveal the facts behind the difference.
In view of the above, modern linguistics is principally concerned with two broad empirical problems
which have often been referred to as the GRAMMATICAL CHARACTERIZATION
PROBLEM and the GRAMMATICAL REALIZATION PROBLEM. Grammatical
characterization entails describing the linguistic competence of native speakers, that is, discovering
and generalizing the grammatical principles that constitute their unconscious knowledge of their
native language. In grammatical characterization, a linguist describes what the principles are which
determine the grammaticality of examples like (1) through (8).
Grammatical realization, on the other hand, entails accounting for native speakers’ LINGUISTIC
PERFORMANCE, that is, their acquisition and use of their unconscious knowledge. In
grammatical realization, a linguist describes how such principles become part of the linguistic
competence of native speakers, in short, how children achieve mastery of their native language.
Linguists must address both the grammatical characterization problem and the grammatical
realization problem in formulating a theory of human language. Clearly, there are huge obstacles
to doing so. Fundamentally, the linguistic competence of humans is a property of the human mind,
and studying the nature of the human mind is as complex a task as studying the nature of the
universe. The grammatical information that native speakers have unconsciously internalized about
their native language is vast, detailed, and often extraordinarily subtle.
One cannot emphasize enough the difference between the unconscious knowledge that native
speakers have of their native language and the knowledge they learn about their language in school.
For example, in school, children learn that English contains many words called homonyms which
are spelled differently but pronounced the same, such as two, to, and too, all of which are
pronounced [tu]. While this is something children consciously learn in school, it is clear that they
already know the difference between these words even when they don’t know how to spell them.
Consider the following sentences, remembering that children do not know how to read when they
first encounter such sentences in speech:
(9) a. I have to clean shirts.
b. I have two clean shirts.
When people read the sentences in (9), they can obviously see the difference between to and two.
But even without reading those sentences or having any knowledge of English spelling or
homonyms, it is clear that native speakers, including children, know the difference between to and
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