But grammar can’t explain language development as a cognitive, social, and cultural phenomenon. Indeed, by learning grammar, you can develop an understanding of a language. If you go back to the 16th century, you could hardly make sense of the English you hear. Giving Shakespeare a break, there was no such thing as grammar back then in the way we think of it today. But reading the Bard of Avon’s plays, you can come across many gross grammatical errors that average people don’t make. Maybe no other person has manipulated the English language like William Shakespeare. Grammar rules simply reflect the usage of language at a particular time. It grows, evolves, and changes over time. People collectively create the language, then come to the rules that describe it and conventionalize it. As a matter of fact, it’s the other way around. Grammar is the conventionalization system of a language, often wrongly distilled into a single word, “ rules.” The word “rules” suggests a language should have a set of rules first, then people can speak it. But contrary to what you might believe, you don’t need to know grammar by heart to learn a language. nurture.Īny language boils down to a set of symbols representing sounds and grammar governing the system.
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