IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE*

In view of the two and a half thousand years of linguistics in the West, a tradition in which there have been remarkably few gaps, it is hardly surprising that most people now have rather explicit ideas about language. The contemporary folk linguistics of western man contains not only simple technical terms such as noun and verb but also various more elaborated concepts, like participle and preposition, active and passive, imperative and subjunctive. It must be admitted of course that these are not always very well understood. A public servant known to me once drafted a letter for his head of department to sign; the letter ended 'As soon as the contract is ready, we will send you a copy of it'. It was returned for correction, with the final clause amended to 'we will send you a copy of same'. On being asked what it was he objected to, the senior official replied: 'You can't end a sentence with a proposition!' Much of our adult folk linguistics is no more than misremembered classroom grammar (or was, in the days when there still was classroom grammar); it may be wrong, but it is certainly not naive. If therefore we want to ask the question, what is it that people naturally know about language, simply by virtue of the fact that they speak an