Introduction

In the previous chapter, we described language as ‘the most complex of human artefacts’. In this chapter we shall flesh out this claim with an overview of the major components of the linguistic system from the perspective of the linguist. Broadly speaking, any language may be viewed from three complementary perspectives: (a) as an internalized body of ‘tacit’ knowledge, (b) as a social construction or set of conventions shared by a language community or (c) as a natural object ‘out there’ in the external world (the ‘E-language’). The internal view of language (or ‘I-language’, as it is sometimes referred to by Chomskian linguistics) is clearly the most relevant perspective for the concerns of this book. The I-language consists of the personal knowledge base that each speaker of the language carries around in his/her head as to how meanings or intentions may be encoded in linguistic expressions. Language users rely on their I-language to interpret or decode other speakers' linguistic expressions and to encode their own meanings in the expressions that they produce. The I-language is usually thought of as a personal dictionary of word meanings and rules for utterance construction; an internal grammar, which we know how to use but cannot easily describe.

Because each speaker acquires language under unique circumstances, I-language grammars may vary somewhat from one speaker to another, in ways that are probably mostly inconsequential for communication between members of a speech community.