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Cognitive Linguistics and Language Rules
Unlike your vocabulary, you don’t have to learn your “mental grammar,” as it’s called. You were born with language rules in your brain. That’s why, long before you started school, you already knew the difference between, “Mommy plays the piano,” and “The piano plays Mommy,” even though both sentences use the same four words. According to specialists in cognitive linguistics, Universal Grammar means your brain automatically rejects patterns such as these:
- Plays piano the Mommy
- Piano the Mommy plays
- The plays Mommy piano
- Piano Mommy plays the
and so on. Your brain has evolved the miraculous capacity to automatically distinguish a “thing” (noun) from an “action” (verb) from a “qualifier” (adjective, adverb, determiner). So, even if you never go to school and learn so-called “proper grammar,” you will observe language rules and speak in grammatically correct sentences, indistinguishable from the sentences spoken by others in your society who have had the benefit of a formal education. “Proper grammar” is built into your brain.
Cognitive linguistics and Chomsky’s generative grammar theory have had an enormous impact in all of the cognitive sciences (i.e., sciences concerned with perception, intelligence, learning, and other aspects of mental function), not just the specialties relating to language. Scientists have since discovered many other modular adaptations throughout the brain.
Every language in the world has the same design features. That is, although languages seem to have completely different syntaxes (grammatical rules), close analysis shows that all languages share the same deep structure. For example, all languages have verbs and nouns and either a subject-object or object-subject order.