Introducing English Linguistics

competence
: the uncon-
scious knowledge of the rules of a language that any fluent speaker pos-
sesses. Writing a grammar of a language therefore involves codifying the
rules that are part of any speaker’s linguistic competence: making explic-
it that in English, for instance, the voicing of a past tense marker depends
upon whether the sound preceding it is voiced or unvoiced, or that when
a pronoun is used as subject of a sentence the subject form of the pronoun
will be used rather than the objective form.
When studying rules of grammar, one really does not leave the speak-
er’s brain, since the focus of discussion is the abstract properties of lan-
guage that any human (barring disability) is naturally endowed with. But
understanding language involves more than describing the psychological
properties of the brain. How language is structured also depends heavily
on context: the social context in which language is used as well as the lin-