*Note: this paper is part of the FLA Proceedings and has been accepted in revised and expanded form for inclusion in the 2017 FLA Journal of Language. Paper was presented: March 13, 2016. Gainesville, Florida, USA

I’ve been straddling the fence between creative writing (publishing poetry mainly, also short fiction) and linguistics for awhile now. I published my first book of poetry before I ever heard of “linguistics,” or at least before I understood what it was—I probably would have answered “stuff to do with language” as an answer to the question “What is linguistics?” (Sound familiar?)  Or, perish the though, I might have even said “A linguist is a person who speaks a bunch of languages.”  My second collection of poetry was released in 2013, just as I was finishing my Ph.D. in the Linguistics Department at the University of Florida.  I had come a long way in my understanding of linguistics as an academic field, and my love of literature, creative writing, fiction, and poetry in particular, hadn’t waned—though it probably had changed in some ways, due at least in part no doubt to my newly gained scientific view of language.

I graduated from college with a BA in English Literature and a BFA in Creative Writing, after gearing up to be a medical doctor for most of my life, including my first 2-3 years as an undergraduate. With linguistics, I thought I had found a fresh, new, scientific way to play with language, one that allowed me to mesh my love of the beauty of language with my desire to discover, model, and analyze things in the natural world. Actually, I sometimes view the rift as being between Creative Writing (artistic production) and English Literature (criticism and analysis), rather than creative language (creative writing and literature appreciation together) and the scientific study of language (linguistics)—including theoretical modeling of sound and grammatical structure, anthropology of language, neurological, psychological, and pathological aspects of speech production, and other aspects that are encompassed in the scientific approach to language that “linguistics” represents as a field. Literature studies are typically seeking to open the box of creative literary work and examine the parts. Literary criticism and linguistics are not all that far apart on that point–looking to dissect the patient, just that literary studies are breaking down the works as a whole and linguistics is at the communicative language level—a bottom-up approach to the same task. The divide that I see is between creatives who want to leave the mystery of beauty through language intact, since that’s usually how it arrived to their pen, rather than considering the “colorless green ideas” as a Chomskian lab rat for syntax class–and worse, concluding that it is “semantically nonsensical, though grammatically correct.” Ditto on considering a novel as a ‘paradigm of post-colonial ambitions’ or the like, rather than an artistic work with only two primary, inherent phases to its biology—production and appreciation/consumption.

At the University of Florida, the English Department was just down the hall in the same building from the Linguistics Department (keep in mind this is on a gigantic campus with 9 libraries, multiple gyms, multiple Starbucks, museums, you name it). And not too far down the hall from there, with a little turn and a twist from English, was Creative Writing. Those two departments shared some faculty, no doubt—they likely shared a good bit of curriculum as well. Down the elevator from the 4^th Floor of our large building and just across the street was a building with Asian languages inside, and next to that was a building that housed European and other languages.  And in the basement of that building were sound laboratories and speech pathology, including the laboratory where I did my doctoral thesis experimentation on vocal typology, while a student completing the requirements of the Linguistics Department, not Speech Pathology. None of this geographical proximity on our large campus was a coincidence of course.  The geography represents how the university community currently views the academic proximity of these fields. But yet, I had to slog my way well across to the other side of campus to Shands (the massive university hospital system) to get to the Rhoton Brain Laboratory (sadly Dr. Rhoton, a giant in his field, passed away recently) to participate in human brain dissection with brain surgeons from around the world. All this is probably why some linguistics programs around the country prefer to remain “programs,” rather than transitioning to formal “departments,” regardless of how big they become. When I was presenting at Purdue University as a graduate student, I was told that their Linguistics Program even encompassed the speech pathology folks. For many at University of Florida (which did transition from a program to a department some time ago, as an acknowledgment of its largess in faculty and student enrollment numbers) this academic inclusion would have been too broad of a definition of “linguistics.” Still, there were many speech pathology graduate students in my phonetics and phonology classes, and I eventually found myself in their laboratories, doing experiments on voice types. I was told once by my advisor that I had essentially strayed outside of “linguistics” as such with my research—though my committee was stilled packed with linguistics professors at my defense.

So, what does all this mean? Let’s return to the 4^th Floor, where the Linguistics and English Departments shared the same hall. Despite the proximity, we couldn’t have been further apart. The difference was something akin to the difference of majoring in “English” in the United States and majoring in “English” in Europe or Asia, for example. An English major in the United States is typically assumed to be continuing the studies that they began in elementary school or junior high school—that is to say after “English” class stopped meaning prescriptive grammar and mechanics and started to mean the study of literature.  So “English” is shorthand for “English Literature,” while “English” as a major in Asia, for example, continues to largely mean prescriptive grammar, usage, competence, communication, etc.—as opposed to reading and analyzing literature as a specialization. The second example (focus on language competency) is actually closer to “Linguistics” in nature and relevance than the first (literary criticism). In fact, the sole faculty member who was briefly shared between our two departments at UF, before he retired, was an EFL specialist. These days, second language acquisition forays outside our department are limited to another slog across campus to the Education Department, in which is housed the English Language Institute—where Linguistics Department graduate students can go for non-departmental Teaching Assistantships, field work, and classroom observation of practitioners for requirements related to SLA and ESL graduate certificates issued by the university. ESL, EFL, and SLA now have nothing at all to do with the English Department. That association retired along with the last faculty member who represented it. So the ties are severed completely now, though the geographical proximity remains. It might be easier to find animosity than kinship in that hallway. In the Linguistics Department, you might find, often self-unaware, dismissive attitudes towards literature—as happened to me in my first Syntax class, when I suggested that I found “colorless green ideas sleeping furiously” to be beautiful and that perhaps there was another layer to language that represented indefinable beauty, even a metaphysical layer. I was roundly slapped down by the professor, who suggested that I was “in the right field if I was looking for a fight.” I was too bewildered to respond, because it truly hadn’t been my intention to pick an intellectual “fight” with the professor. I honestly thought I was taking class discussion in an obvious direction that the instructor would appreciate and might have planned to address anyway. In the same way that two competing syntactic theories, after being judged to be equally sufficient in their ability to render consistently correct outcomes, can then be judged against each other on the criteria of “elegance”—which usually implies simplicity, but often involve an aesthetic evaluation as well, which is not always strictly scientific in nature. I think this concept of elegance of theory is a tip of the hat toward the limitations of science in language analysis. This was the answer I suspected I might receive in class. Not only was it not the one I received, it’s one I’ve never received from a theoretical syntactician or any other linguist in my graduate studies. Perhaps if there were a bridge between the departments intellectually, an outreached hand from one side of the hall to the other in ideology, it could be there. Sadly, even from the English Department, my old undergraduate academic home territory, there was on occasion a complete dismissal of linguistics. Perhaps not dismissed on its merit, but on its relevance. It was difficult to find a faculty member in the English Department over 40 who had taken even an introductory level undergraduate class in linguistics. This was disheartening, in no small part because second language English instructors and first language English mechanics instructors continue to be recruited from English departments in native speaking countries, not from the far smaller pool of linguistics departments. This means that language instruction, no matter how effective, talented, or passionate the instructor, continues to be taught with a strict prescriptive perspective and with a general unawareness of the scientific aspects of language that allow instructors to handle a host of questions and issues that arise while teaching students striving for basic competence in either their second of even first languages. This includes everything form accent correction to imparting a perspective that allows students to compare their own native language to others and understand the universal and non-universal aspects of human language and the linguistic limitations and uniting features of the human mind. This perspective is invaluable in a student’s strive toward competence in a language and an instructor’s ability to teach with maximum efficiency. The idea that many English departments in universities, English departments in high schools, and ESL programs are populated sometimes exclusively with people who have up to Ph.D. levels of education in the target language, but lack the background of even a single undergraduate class in linguistics is a travesty and an embarrassment. Most are even unaware that this is the case, as they don’t really know what linguistics is exactly.  This could and should be corrected by requiring every undergraduate at every  university to take at least an introductory level linguistics class as a requirement of any language major, even if it makes older faculty in English departments and elsewhere uncomfortable in becoming self-aware of their own hither-to-for intellectual deficits. This is harsh and comes across as self-righteous I’m sure, but I’m a person who came out of those shadows. I always thought I might continue on to a Ph.D. in English, and I believe I might have continued all the way through to a faculty posting without ever realizing what I was missing. For me, it is that important, and I’m confident that English Departments could retrain faculty who might have deficiencies in the new requirements and curriculum. Where should the growing number of Linguistics Ph.D.s find employment in academia?  For one, in English Departments across the United States, and not just as ESL specialists. Every department needs at least one linguist to offer all of the undergrads a taste of the scientific side of language. Professors of literary theory and appreciation teaching mechanics and English as a second language, under the moniker of “English” is not cutting it.

Having said all that, back to the question at hand: Are linguistics and literature in conflict?

Of course, if one were just talking about appreciating literature as a reader, not as a literary criticism specialized academic or even as a creator of literary works per se, then there are other (though I think surmountable) challenges. The biggest is that linguistics training can lead to a kind of conscious attentiveness to the structure of language that is hard to switch off when it’s time to actually enjoy language holistically. On the extreme side, it can be hard to converse verbally at times without analyzing every sound and morphosyntactic structure that comes out of your ones mouth. It’s akin to talking on the phone or on Skype with a bad connection, where you hear your own voice repeated back to you on a one to two second delay while talking. Difficult to compose under those kind of conditions, difficult even to appreciate and savor. I suspect the same would be true of a linguist, in the analytical throws of composing a complex scientific paper, who takes a break to appreciate the musical flow of Steinbeck’s prose, or the verse of Wordsworth.. that’s a hard square to circle. I’ve chosen to explore this point of conflict as a research question—friction or symmetry? Optimistic minds like mine hope for the later, but that sure was a long few steps down the hall from my old Linguistics Department to the English Department at the University of Florida. Those few steps were longer in intellectual bridging than the slog across campus to the neurosurgery laboratories on campus, because in fact we had a neurolinguistics specialist in our department and many more that were interested in the field. While research and collaborative forays into neuroscience and neurosurgery were far from required of graduate students in our department, they were far more welcome than collaboration with the literati and creative writing types down the hall.

Phonology deals with the sound structures of languages. A linguist who focuses on this subfield is known as a phonologist.

A crucial precursor to phonology is phonetics. By studying phonetics, linguistics get to know the sounds of languages themselves, that is, how sounds are produced in the mouth, what the tongue does, what the glottis does, what the lips do, etc. There are many more sounds in any given language than any native (or non-native!) speaker can perceive and hear. Phoneticians seek to explore and describe these sounds scientifically. All phonologists need a solid grasp in at least the basic concrete facts of phonetics for their study of language to make sense.

Phonologists, however, are less interested in the sounds themselves and more interested in how the sounds form a system in a given language. In other words, how are those sounds structured into units? These units may or may not be audible to an external observer as a set in terms of their phonetic characteristics, but nonetheless might make up a real set conceptually and in terms of their distribution in language data. Below, using ordinary data from our own common-sense, personal knowledge of English, we will talk about how the “T” sound in English behaves a certain way. It is this level of imaginary structure, the phonemic or phonological level, that native speakers perceive most easily. Phonologists thus seek describe sounds accurately while honing in on some logical relationships between the sounds.

For a relatively simple example, let’s take a look at the English sound “T.” It’s represented by the letter  “T/t,” and is actually made up several different consonant realizations or “phones” (more audible to non-native speakers than to native speakers!). The “T” sound, at its most basic level, can be understood as a single phoneme (or abstract sound) with several possible allophones of it (or concrete sounds):

1. Top is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar stop with aspiration (a puff of air)
2. Stop is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar stop without aspiration (no puff of air)
3. Tot is pronounced as an unreleased (begun but not ended) voiceless alveolar stop, and is often simply reduced to a glottal gesture, at least in casual speech
4. Butter is pronounced as a voiced alveolar flap

None of these allophones or pronunciations of abstract English /t/ (written in slashes to designate the phonemic level) is more “t” or less “t,” at least not in English. For the phoneme to exist in its full state, we need all the allophones.

Another part of phonology is to go about describing in which cases (or “environments”) each allophone occurs and proving that “T” is actually unique from, say, “D.” To continue our with example–leaving out more data and an adequate phonological argument, since they are beyond the scope of this article–allophone 1 above appears at the very beginning of a word and in a stressed syllable, allophone 2 appears after /s/ even if the rest of the previous conditions are satisfied, allophone 3 appears at the end of a word, and allophone 4 appears between two vowels as long as the second isn’t stressed. To prove that the allophones of /T/ belong to a separate phoneme class as those of /D/, for instance, we notice that “tot” and “Todd” have different meanings and are distinguished phonemically only by /t/ vs. /d/. This proves that, in English, “t” and “d” are unique from each other or, in phonological jargon, “allophones of separate phonemes.”

We at Florida Linguistics hope you’ve enjoyed this short article and found it useful. The next article in the Subfields of Linguistics series will deal with morphology.

In some of my classes, students tell me that their professors in non-linguistics classes often wax-philosophical about the inevitability of Chinese as the next global lingua franca.  Sometimes they even present it as an imminent development that has already started to take a foothold, due to the rising economic power of the PRC and the increasing frequency of successful Mandarin speaking students matriculating in American and other Western universities.

I’ve been troubled by this assumption, and its lack of scientific grounding.  In fact, it reminds me very much of other non-scientifically-based assertions about language that were profligate in years gone by, such as the “Eskimos having a hundred words for ‘snow’ in their language” as evidence for how ones environment and culture shapes ones perspective on the world.  Language scientists, namely Geoffrey Pullum, have been crusading ever since, in vein, to try and dispel this fallacy about West Greenlandic Eskimo (which in fact has only 2 root words for the “snow”) ever since.  Still, non-linguistically trained academics of otherwise excellent intellectual quality continue to profligate the fallacy, as it makes for a nice opener to a lecture, talk, or speech.

There is little evidence to indicate that Mandarin Chinese is spreading around the world as a candidate for global lingua franca status as either a second or first language.  In fact, the Chinese government has had its hands full with roping in all of the mutually unintelligible languages, or “dialects” as the one-China policy motivated government likes to call them, and their speakers into adopting Mandarin as a national lingua franca at the second language level.  This has not stopped entities from journalists to professors to science fiction writers from making the claim, however, that Chinese is becoming the new global lingua franca.  Not even the most ardent Chinese nationalists themselves or other of the most enthusiastic promoters of the idea that China is the next, obvious, and inevitable super power of the globalized world argue that Chinese is going to be a lingua franca of such a theoretical Chinese-dominated world of the future.  There are many reasons, pointed out by level-headed linguistic realists, like John McWhorter and others, indicate that this is in fact not the likely scenario.  Nearly all of Asia, with China leading the pack, is increasing their English mandatory and voluntary education at a clip that is even faster than the growth of their economies in recent years.  People all over the world are giving up minority and even widely-spoken first languages in favor of the “killer language” suspect number one, English.  Globalization is a one time phenomenon (barring nuclear holocaust or some other catastrophic global tragedy that results in a reset to medieval times and a cessation of global connectivity).  English is the language, for better or worse; fairly or unfairly; through pure incidence of circumstance perhaps, that is carrying us through this warp speed transition from unconnected world to globalized, connected, united world status.  Internet, academic publication, road sign standards, public safety announcements, the global trade language, scientific standards and collaborative organizations, international language of air traffic control, and on and on—all English!

Friends and colleagues, I say this not out of self interest or linguistic pride, though I am a native speaker of Standard American English: English is here to stay.  All scientific evidence points to such a conclusion, and we are obligated as language scientists to proffer hypotheses and theories about our linguistic futures that are based on data analysis and application of the scientific method.  English is the communication tool, for the foreseeable future, of this new, emerging globalized world.  We have been assured in the not too distant past of the near-future global dominance rise of Russia, then Japan, as well as the continued dominance of America.  We are now assured by the popular media and pop-anthropologists of the day of the inevitability of the Chinese global super power.  They may well be right or wrong in this most recent assertion.  If that is the case, or if through twist of fate China stumbles as others did and Africa or some other struggling developer emerges as the new contender for replacement of American economic hegemony, we need to heed what history has taught us about government or other powerful entities’ attempts to assert control over natural language change—namely, it cannot be controlled, but instead is governed by natural forces.  These forces, when studied objectively, indicate that the English infrastructure currently being put in place for global communication into the future will be the tool of any future super power—whether it be China, the EU, Africa, the United Nations, or even a new Latino ethnic majority United States of America.  Any power that assumes the economic and military power mantel of this newly minted globalized world will use English as the language of government, to pass on their marching orders and profligate their “soft power,” whether it be their first or second language, by choice of planning or no.  English (in whatever form it exists by that time) will be the coded language of this new shining or tarnished world of the future, and the new leaders will be forced to use this code to propel and churn this new mechanism effectively.

To get the basics of what grammar is and the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, please read Lee Ballard’s blog post  “What is Grammar?”
Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar in the Classroom:
Perhaps the term prescriptive grammar is more relevant when one is teaching a language to people who already speak it, teaching language A to so called native speakers of language A. In this way prescriptivism is trying to change someone’s language because he or she speaks (writes) in an “incorrect” manner. I placed write in parenthesis because writing does not hold to the same degree of naturalness as does speaking.
The absurdity of prescriptivism in this setting can be witnessed when normal school children who live in an English speaking community and have English speaking parents have to lament that they are failing English. However, their lamentations are perfectly natural to all the English ears around them. Naturalness and descriptivism go hand in hand, as to be discussed later. Furthermore, the prescriptive situation described above also involves a lack of understanding or explanation from both parties involved. In the case of the student, he or she sees no need to change or modify his or her speech. In the case of the teacher, he or she often feels that no explanation for advocating Form A over B is really needed because what is being taught is “correct”. (Look I found a book that claims to be a grammar book that says what I am saying, and no one ever lies in a book.)  This situation is important to recognize because it further distinguishes the type of prescriptive grammar given here, the more textbook definition, from prescriptive grammar as is taught to non-native speakers. I will call the type of prescriptivism above “formal prescriptivism”.
On the other hand descriptive grammar attempts to capture the patterns that native speakers produce competently. In other words, it is the patterns native speakers use naturally without self or peer correction. It is theoretically impossible to ever say you have the absolute correct descriptive grammar because no one has ever accounted for all the data because the data is theoretically infinite in size. Moreover, languages change in perpetuity and thus what was once an accurate description is no longer true. Linguistics feels that when we arbitrarily decide that a past form should be imposed upon present language use, we are committing one of the prescriptive sins. The other prescriptive sin is deliberately trying to add grammatical features from one language to another because there is a belief that the latter is superior. (We all should know that languages borrow from each other naturally though, however, argument could be made on this point.)   Thus while seemingly all prescriptive grammar comes from descriptive grammar, at times grammarians prescribe descriptions from other languages or mathematical logic, the story of Robert Lowth and double negatives. This often amounts to giving Type A blood to a Type B person. Nonetheless, rules from natural language can be successfully learned and incorporated just as one learns a foreign language. It is unclear how much foreign grammar interacts with native grammar, how much remains on the periphery versus how much percolates to the core. However, it most certainly interacts. Thus teaching grammar prescriptively can have effects even if it is far removed from actual description.
To recapitulate and clarify, descriptive grammar is recording language patterns in natural settings from a roughly homogenous group. Prescriptive grammar is elevating Form A over Form B because Form A is believed to better. Again, a reason for such belief is not necessary. Also teaching pronunciation is teaching a type of grammar (i.e patterns of speech).
When teaching  a second, third etc… language you have to be prescriptive. In the field of SLA the idea of inter-languages is well established. This is the idea that language learners create/innovate grammars as they travel from their native language to their target language.  This is why many, perhaps all, errors are systematic. Mistakes on the other hand are more like slips of the tongue.    Now if students were happy or content with the inter-language they have developed, then they would not be enrolled at a language learning institute. Forgive my idealization for a moment. Thus they believe they are incorrect, most of the time, and so do the teachers. This is a big difference from the setting that creates formal prescriptivism as described above. Foreign Language learners want to change the way they speak to get closer to the target language. In this way teachers must prescribe to them patterns that are unnatural for them.  We certainly are not going to just describe what they are already doing and say that it is interesting because such action is not what we are hired to do. There should be no issue here. However, there is a choice as to deciding what the target really is.
Let’s consider English.  Is the target GMAT or IELTS English or is it Engineering or Literary English? Beyond that, is it news anchor English, Ebonics, Appalachian English, some other noticeably accented form of English, or just the dialect of the teacher mixed with some notions of “Standard English”? Students are never given and rarely inquire about so much specificity regarding their target because they too believe that they are just learning English, as if such a thing neatly existed.
The reason the choice of the target is important is that just like with formal prescriptivism this prescriptivism, while unavoidable, lends itself to the same biases. Gender and culture can be marginalized. It may be important for student A to be able to speak in a quote on quote masculine or feminine manner. As an aside, most western men who go to Japan speak in a feminine manner because they were taught by women. This does not ostensibly aid them in the business world.
To move along, Black and Appalachian Englishes are looked down upon, so those forms will not pragmatically be the target. No English language learning program uses them as the target to my knowledge. Thus the target would appear to be the most prestigious or advantageous form of English. Can anyone tell me what this is?
If ethics are now formally injected, they must compete with such pragmatic sensibility. If I am in the business world of America, I don’t want to speak or write one of the varieties of Appalachian or Black English because we believe they are not perceived as being educated forms of speech. One’s perception will undoubtedly carry them a long way with regards to raises and promotions. Are we not ethically responsible for enabling our students with the best chance possible? I will temporally rest with this.

If we asked people to brainstorm on what they think about when they hear the word “grammar,” I think we would get some interesting results. When the word “grammar” comes up in conversation, I’ve noticed that people I meet regularly confuse it with a few things, which I call “negative experiences with grammar.” From my experience, people’s associations of the word “grammar” fall into three categories.

First, grammar is misunderstood as a way to punctuate writing.

Second, grammar is misunderstood as a way to reformulate phrases and sentences in written prose from what sound natural in ordinary speech. Grammar is basically made up of ways to speak “correctly” as opposed to what’s natural. Natural speech, then, is by extension presumed to be wrong. But if you can banish what sounds natural, you will be using language in the right way, so they say.

Finally, for non-native speakers learning a new language, grammar is often thought to be a set of mysterious endings or sentence patterns that are out there in books and tables, but only vaguely understood. These patterns, especially word endings that don’t transfer 1-to-1 from their native language, are considered redundant and unneeded. By intermediate learners of languages, correct grammar is often seen as a waste of time, because it is not really necessary for communication. Nonetheless, the best students are still capable of memorizing this grammar, usually because it’s “like math” or “logical.”

The linguist’s conception of grammar is necessarily in conflict with all three of people’s negative experiences with grammar.

First of all, grammar cannot possibly have anything to do with punctuation, because language is primarily spoken, not written. Most languages do not have a writing system (and some have more than one writing system), and they are still full-fledged, healthy languages.

In regard to misconception number two, everyday speech is the natural life of a language, and conscious rules are forced and unnatural. Think about what these rules imply about how language really works. For every prescriptive rule of the form “don’t do X” or “always do Y,” the reason for the rule is that people do do X, or aren’t really too keen on doing Y. Therefore, the grammar of the linguist and grammar of the schoolteacher are necessarily in conflict.
Now we come to number three—foreign language learners often have such little interaction with native speakers or native speaker communities that language becomes too abstract. Foreign languages are thus often reduced to mathematical systems that can be mastered silently at home and in private. “Grammar” of this type can be graded easily by non-experts, as many foreign language teachers have but a mediocre grasp of the language they’re teaching, and possibly no real experience living in a community where that language is spoken. For communication, foreign language “grammar” is quite unrealistically presented and not always useful.

For linguists, grammar might be defined as “the set of intuitions that native speakers have about what sentences sound good and what sentences don’t sound good.” These are called “grammaticality judgments,” and they make up a large body of linguistic data. Explaining these judgments is the goal of syntax, one of the traditional subfields of modern language science. Grammar for a modern linguist is something that is acquired unconsciously by children, because humans are hard-wired for language.

Grammar is also the source of the creativity of native speakers. The sentences we say are not memorized. The rules are not known consciously, so the rules governing language cannot be put into a book. Any book (even a linguistics book).

For me, the disconnect between “grammar” as the world views it and what little knowledge I have of the real grammars of language makes me feel a little uneasy. Actually, it feels a little like Gnosticism, like I’ve got some secret knowledge that the mainstream doesn’t have. I am embarrassed that my beliefs, which are quite traditional and accepted within my own field, make me sound like an insane person to so-called language experts outside of linguistics.

A few facts muddy the waters and cloud native speakers’ judgments. Trying to be correct, accommodation, variation, and sentences that are just hard to judge end up complicating a task that should otherwise be simple to do.

When a linguist gives a native speaker a sentence, negative experience number two often comes into play. Instead of answering with a yes or no, the native speaker responds with “I don’t know – what’s correct?” Another version of this: when asked a question about language, we remember some rule that we heard somewhere, and try to implement that rule on the fly. Sometimes we’re not quite sure how that rule was supposed to work, but we figure that we might as well try to follow it. Now that someone’s asking, it’s really important to “get it right.”

Another problem with getting clear judgments is that speakers of a language often like to cut their conversation partner some slack, even to the extent of starting to talk like their friends. This is called “accommodation theory.” When native speakers interact with non-native speakers, many of us have a tendency to accommodate our speech, consciously or unconsciously, to the way the other person is talking. If they ask us if something is right, we may cut them some slack, or even lose track of our own native grammar, because we’re too busy molding our speech to non-native patterns.

Another problem complicating grammar is that some statements are okay in one variety of a language, but not in another. So if in America we say, “When I got there, she hadn’t yet gotten my e-mail”, and in some other English-speaking country they say “When I arrived, she hadn’t yet got my e-mail”, native speakers of the first variety should feel confident saying that the former version sounds better to them than the latter. But this is not always the case, because our conscious knowledge about other varieties of the same “language” clouds our judgment of what our unconscious, grammatical knowledge really is.

Finally, some statements really are unclear. They may be marginally correct, or we may be able to contrive some strange situation in which we would expect the sentence to be uttered. In cases like this, it’s hard to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down response.

Unfortunately, things don’t look too good for the linguistic/scientific understanding of grammar. People continue to learn foreign languages where grammar is idealized in tables for solo memorization. This grammar is drilled until students are bored to tears and forget why they wanted to learn the language in the first place. We don’t use our commas correctly, which is supposedly a really bad thing. Traditional educational establishments, like some teachers of high school English, college writing teachers, and experts in non-language fields, continue to propagate old prescriptive ideas about language without questioning them or justifying their out-of-date rules. Publishing houses put out reference books that contribute to an understanding of language as static, right/wrong (with the “right” version in their books), and memorized (not creative).

If we want to make progress, maybe we should just forget everything we’ve ever heard about grammar. Then maybe we’ll realize that if we just talk normally, we’ve known how to say what we wanted to all along.

“What’s your major?”
“Linguistics.”
“So how many languages do you speak?”
“Well, ah, mmm, you know, ……”

This constructed dialogue depicts a scenario that many linguistics students have encountered or will eventually encounter in life.  As modern linguistics is a relatively new field of study, especially compared with other disciplines of science, it is understandable that most laymen have no idea about the essence of linguistics.  One of the most common misconceptions of linguistics is that linguists must speak many languages.  Whenever a friend asks me how many languages I speak after knowing that I study linguistics, I always attempt to explain to them what type of research linguists are doing.  However, their perplexed facial expressions suggest that I fail to convince them that linguists are not necessarily polyglots.  Sometimes I think maybe I should just provide them with the answer that they want to hear: “I can speak eight languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, English, French, Japanese, Saisiyat, Kavalan, and Amis.”  This of course is misleading since having done research or fieldwork on a language does not mean that I can speak that language.
Another misconception of linguistics, especially in Asian countries, is to associate linguistics with English teaching or excellent English abilities.  It is undeniable that English teaching, or Second Language Acquisition, in general, is an important sub-field of applied linguistics.  Linguistics nevertheless encompasses a much wider variety of research areas.  The reason why laymen in Asian countries misconceive linguists as successful English learners might be attributed to the origin of contemporary linguistics.  Linguistics is inextricably linked to the English language, whether you like it or not, as most well-known pioneers of contemporary linguistic theories are native speakers of English.  That is why in Taiwan, where no universities currently confer a Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, undergraduate linguistics courses are usually offered by English departments.  However, to the surprise of most laymen, the ability to speak a second language, like English, well is not equivalent to the ability to analyze a language from a linguistic point of view.  The connection between the two is merely tenuous.  Having said that, speaking, or at least being able to read, English well is of great advantage to a linguist, as it enables one to be able to read current research and publications and to be able to study in Western universities.
So what on earth is linguistics?  It is impossible to give a thorough and satisfactory answer to this question in a few words or sentences, due to the considerable debate over the nature of language between formalists and functionalists.  Put simply, linguistics is “the scientific study of language.”  The key word is “scientific.”  Just like other researchers of scientific disciplines, linguists adopt a scientific approach to analyzing language.  In other words, based on the linguistic data we collect, we make generalizations and form hypotheses and then further test our hypotheses against more linguistic data.  More importantly, the “language” that linguists strive to understand is not any particular language like English, Chinese, or Japanese.  The languages that we actually speak are the surface realizations of our “language” capacity.  The ultimate goal of linguistics is to grasp and explain this “language” mechanism that is shared by all human beings.  Doing analysis on a human language is the first necessary step toward achieving this long-term goal.  A linguist does not need to speak all the languages in the world.  The construction of a linguistic theory that can explain “language” should be viewed instead as a collaborative process, with the findings on a particular language complementing those on other languages.