Response to Newmeyer's 'Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage'

Abstract

In an article in a recent issue of Language (Newmeyer 2003), Frederick Newmeyer argues for a clear separation between what he terms 'knowledge of language [i.e. grammar] and use of language [i.e. pragmatics]' (682). In developing his argument, N makes frequent reference to linguistic analyses that are corpus-based, that is, centered on information taken from large datasets of actual speech or writing (e.g. transcriptions of conversations, newspaper articles, novels). In N's view, grammar is distinct from pragmatics, and because a corpus contains examples of actual language use drawn from a large community of speakers and writers, it can yield only performance data. As a result, N argues, 'there is no way that one can draw conclusions about the grammar of an individual from usage facts about communities, particularly communities from which the individual receives no speech input' (696). Implicit in this argument, however, is the view that the traditional way of collecting linguistic data-introspection-somehow gives us insights into the competence of the native speaker that corpus data cannot. The real issue, we argue, is not which kind of data gets us closer to the native speaker's competence, a goal that we believe is largely unobtainable, but rather how linguists can best collect data relevant to the linguistic analyses they are conducting. There is considerable evidence that a corpus can enrich our understanding of language and, in many cases, provide linguists with examples they would have never considered had they relied only on data obtained through introspection. To support this view, it is worth reviewing N's critique of Manning's (2003) use of corpus data to challenge Pollard and Sag's (1994) analysis of verb subcategorization in English. Manning (2003:299) notes that Pollard and Sag claim that the verb regard can be followed by as-complements (1) but not by predicative to-complements (2). (1) We regard Kim as an acceptable candidate. (2) *We regard Kim to be an acceptable candidate. However, in an analysis of texts in the New York Times, Manning (2003:300) found examples such as 3, where regard can take a to-complement.