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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 4
particular language. ‘[A] grammar is a mental entity, represented in the
mind/brain of an individual and characterising that individual’s linguistic
capacity’ (Lightfoot 2000: 231). Note that Lightfoot here talks of a grammar
rather than of a language,but one possible definition of a language is precisely
that it is the grammatical system which allows speakers to produce appropriate
utterances. ‘Grammar’ has as many meanings as ‘language’ (see section 4).
In this sense, we might see a language as a set of choices, a set of contrasts.
We can say Kim kissed the crocodile or The crocodile kissed Kim, but we cannot
choose to say, as a meaningful sentence of English, Kissed crocodile Kim the.
There is a system to what orders the words have to come in if they are to make
sense. We choose, in English, whether to say towel or cowl, but we cannot
choose, in English, to say something with a consonant half-way between the
/t/ of towel and the /k/ of cowl to mean something which is part towel and
part cowl (or, indeed, to mean anything else). There is a system to what sounds
we use in English. So a language can be viewed as a system of systems. This
view is usually attributed to Meillet: ‘Every language forms a system in which
everything is interconnected’ (Meillet 1903: 407 [my translation] 3 ). But he has
forerunners who make the same point in similar terms, e.g.: ‘Every language is
a system all of whose parts interrelate and interact organically’ (von der
Gabelentz 1901: 481, as cited and translated by Matthews 2001: 6; see the footnote
for the original German 4 ).
Another alternative way of considering language is to ignore the way in
which speakers go about constructing utterances, and consider instead their
output, an actual set of utterances or (in a more idealised form) a set of sentences.
A language can be defined as a set of sentences:
the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is
the language of that speech community. (Bloomfield 1957 [1926]: 26)
[A] language [is] a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length
and constructed out of a finite set of elements. (Chomsky 1957: 13)
The question of whether we should be dealing with utterances (things produced,
whether in speech of in writing, by speakers) or sentences raises another
potential distinction. Chomsky (1986) introduces the notion of a distinction
between E-language and I-language. Smith (1994) already talks of this distinction
as a ‘customary’ one, which may be an overstatement of the case, but he
draws the distinction very clearly:
3 ‘chaque langue forme un système où tout se tient.’
4 ‘Jede Sprache is ein System, dessen sämmtliche Theile organisch zusammenhängen und
zusammenwirken.’