The Indirect Object Movement rule, discussed recently in this column, has elicited some interesting response from several readers. One of them feels that in matters of language it is altogether a question of how it ‘feels’ or how it ‘rings’. If it feels or rings right, then it is OK.  Otherwise there is something wrong with it.  That is all. Not rules but how the ear feels it.

How often haven’t you come across people saying:  ‘I warned him several times.  But however he wouldn’t listen’. ‘You can avail this facility anytime you want’.  ‘You seems to be worried about something’ ….  You can be quite sure that the persons who speak such sentences are absolutely sure that they are all speaking good English. They haven’t the slightest idea that such sentences are just ungrammatical.

It is only with native speakers born to speak a particular language, that their ‘feel’ for the language can be trusted. The language is ingrained in the native speaker’s brain. He is not consciously aware of it.  He may not (and usually cannot) explain why a certain construction is  ‘wrong’.  He may simply say: ‘that’s not how we say it’.  But this does not mean that there are no rules governing the structure of a language.  Just think of it.

Vocabulary has to be learned. Table in English is meju in Kannada and mez in Hindi.  The speaker of Hindi may not know what in the doldrums means and the speaker of English will not know what hase mane means.  No one is born with these items as a genetic endowment.  But the way the words of a language are strung together – this is already pre-determined in the brain.  It cannot be the case that the mind actually stores (in whatever order) all the sentences that we speak.  For the simple reason that even the speaker may not know what he is going to say tomorrow at 9  in the morning and the day after at 10 in the evening.  Quite simply sentences are not stored.  They are formed, strung together, as occasion arises.

But how are they strung together? There must be rules describing what strings are permissible and what strings are not. That is, there is a syntactic component in the language section of the brain.

Arguing further on the same lines one will see that these rules have to be extremely simple, minimal and, very likely uniform across languages – with, obviously, some guiding principles which decide that, for example, while prepositions precede a noun in English, they follow a noun in Kannada.

There is nothing new in what I am saying here.  I am merely summarising, rather crudely, the vast and fascinating research that has been going on in what is known as the generative framework. Research in this field was initiated in the mid fifties by Noam Chomsky at MIT and is still going on, even today, under his guidance; and by his students and students’ students in many parts of the world.  The ‘Generative Enterprise’ as it has been called, is the most significant development in Linguistics in the 20th century.

The point of all this is:  language is governed by a set of rules.  These rules are not immediately apparent.  The native speaker is not aware of them.  But they exist.  And the job of Linguistics is to uncover these rules.

As I mentioned in my last week’s column, everything in language is not rule governed.  There is a segment of language which is what it is:  the idiom component.  In the phrase a turn for Mathematics, just look at the article ‘a’.  This article is usually found with count nouns (a boy, a girl, a book, etc). But is ‘a turn’ singular in the sense in which a cat and a dog are singular in A cat chased a dog? Of course not.  Actually turn (in the phrase) is not a count noun at all. You can’t say Ram, Hari and John have turns for Mathematics, Linguistics and Physics. And yet you find a non-count noun used with a.  Why?  Or how?

There is no answer except that it is what it is. A person who uses this phrase correctly does so not because he has a ‘feel’ for English; he has learned it. In mastering a foreign (non-native) language, then, there are two things to be learned: the rules of the language; the natural idiom of the language. The first can be made intelligible. It can be analysed and explained. The second one is leaned as unanalysable chunks or pieces of the language.

A. He looked daggers at her.
B. You mean he threw …?
C. No, Silly.
There are of course ‘class’ distinctions in any language.  But the speakers of each class speak the language the way it is spoken in that class.

The writer can be contacted at ksyadurajan@yahoo.com