Deep Grammar

Dear Readers,

Put these words in the order that seems most rational: (Don’t continue reading until you put these five words in the order that feels right!)

French the young girls four

I bet the order you put these words in was, “The four young French girls.” OK, here’s the crazy part: that’s how all native English speakers do it! Coincidence? I think not. There’s actually a grammatical rule that tells us how English speakers arrange adjectives. It goes number, then age, then nationality. See, it’s “the five old Irish men” not, “the old five Irish men.” We all follow that rule of arranging adjectives, but hardly anybody actually explicitly knows about the rule. That is, hardly anybody can articulate what the correct order is for arranging adjectives of number, age and nationality, but native English speakers can use the rule perfectly without even thinking about it. When we speak, we are following a rule that we don’t even know about.

(I stole this from the article Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar by Patrick Hartwell.)

Grammar goes even deeper. There is a deep, deep grammar inside our heads, which grammar is inaccessible to us. A lifetime of sentence diagramming will not unlock the mysteries of language use. People try to figure out what's going on when we talk. Linguistics is the attempt to make implicit language use explicit.

Truly our brains are beautiful. Our brains are like caverns nobody has seen.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa