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

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.

(3) Conservatives argue that the Bible regards homosexuality to be a sin.

Manning notes that counterexamples such as 3 were not anomalous: he found many additional discrepancies between Pollard and Sag’s intuitions and the data appearing in his corpus.

In commenting on Manning’s observations, N states:

Perhaps [example 2] is generated by Pollard’s grammar and perhaps it is not. Perhaps [example 2] is generated by Sag’s grammar and perhaps it is not. But we will never find out by reading the New York Times. The point is that we do not have ‘group minds’. No input data that an individual did not experience can be relevant to the nature of his or her grammar.

(696)

But the issues raised by examples 1–3 have less to do with notions such as ‘group minds’ and ‘input data’ and more to do with how we collect data for the linguistic analyses that we conduct. Linguists arguing against the use of corpus data in favor of introspection seem to think that they have direct access to the native speaker’s competence—that by consulting their own intuitions, they will be able to make ‘grammaticality judgments’. But does anyone (linguist or otherwise) really have access to linguistic competence? And does intuition equal competence? Schütze (1996:26) argues that ‘in principle, there might someday be an operational criterion for grammaticality, but it would have to be based on direct study of the brain, not on human behavior, if it turns out to be possible to discern properties of the mind (e.g., the precise features of grammar) from physical properties of the brain’.

In other words, data collected introspectively or from a corpus is data based on different types of human behavior: the experiences of the linguist in the former, the experiences of many individuals in the latter. And linguistic behavior is notoriously variable. Snow and Meijer (1977) found that linguists and nonlinguists make...