Grammar is to meaning as the law is to good behaviour

Abstract

The Special Issue of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory on Geoffrey Sampson's Target Paper, “Grammar without grammaticality” made fascinating reading. Sampson argues that “the concept of ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘ill-formed’ is a delusion, based on a false conception of the kind of thing a human language is” (p. 1). For the most part Sampson's case was strong and the counter-arguments from commentators less so. But with one striking exception. As Sampson acknowledges, the rules like (for English) “a third-person singular word form should not take a first- or second-person subject” or, “a definite article precedes rather than follows the noun with which it is in a construction” seem categorical: all he can do, in order to preserve his thesis, is to argue that linguists' sentences talking about grammaticality might infringe them, but he acknowledges that that argument carries little conviction, even for himself (p. 20–21).