Suggested Answers for Check Questions

Native speakers of a language have at their disposal a system that enables them to produce and understand an infinite number of utterances in everyday life. They produce and understand sentences never said or heard before; when they know the meaning of a word they also know how to pronounce it and what are the combinations that given word can occur in. In addition, native speakers are capable of explaining why a sentence is ungrammatical (‘incorrect’) in that particular language without necessarily being able to refer to specific grammar rules. All this constitutes linguistic knowledge and to a large part linguistic knowledge is unconscious. Given that there is no limit on the number of utterances we produce and decode, linguistic knowledge may seem infinite but more plausibly it is possible to devise a system of rules that will generate all and only the possible utterances in a language.