Reuben Castelino

February 26, 2016

Lin 1 Ojeda

In What is a Language?, Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson argue that human languages are
rule-based systems; they prove this by defining grammar and showing that people have this
grammar and know it innately.
Following their analysis, to determine if a language is a rule-based system, a definition of
linguistic rules must be created. Linguistic rules also known as a grammar exist if it fulfils the
following two main tasks: it separates grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences
allowing certain phrases to be correct while others are not and it must also provide a description
of how these grammatical sentences can be pronounced, how they are formed, and what they mean.
Once this definition for linguistic rules is created, Smith and Wilson show how it is easy to
find that this grammar exists amongst speakers of a language. Often, speakers correct themselves
when speaking showing that people have an internal knowledge of whether sentences can be valid.
To fully prove this claim though, we also have to determine where this system lies and how it is
created. When exploring the boundaries of this system, the authors show that it cannot be solely
limited to a language. Even within a language, speakers of the same language will sometimes find
differences in their speech leading to the notion of dialects. This idea of dialects shows that there
may be a certain geographic convention which speakers follow to speak. A convention would
conflict with a rule-based system because conventions need at least two people to create and follow
it while a rule-based system can be operated alone.
Smith and Wilson give the examples of children first learning a language and adults with
unique speech patterns to prove that people speak based on a rule-based system rather than
following a geographical convention. Children, when learning their language for the first time, often
create new rules to fill in the gaps of their knowledge based on what they've learned so far. For

instance, when learning about the past tense of common verbs such as talked, danced, and
moved, the child may think that adding -ed to the end of a verb will make it past tense. This can
lead to made-up words such as comed, runned, and singed instead of came, ran, and
sang. The child still has his own way of speaking which follows his own rules; he doesn't think
that what he is saying is wrong though many around him may say so. He doesn't follow any
convention of those around him to learn his speech but rather picks up aspects of the language and
sometimes fills in the gaps of his knowledge with rules that he creates himself. This applies to
adults too showing that this unique and individual rule-based system applies throughout a person's
life. Many adults have little quirks that may not be grammatically correct but are still maintained by
specific individuals such as (as given by Smith and Wilson): What did you go out and do? vs.
What did you do when you went out? vs What did you go out without doing?
To me, this helped form an argument as to why an individual can have a unique set of rules
which govern their language and yet new words and slang can still form and spread. Even though
every person has their own set of rules, each set is similar to their neighbours as they have both
heard similar phrases and utterances. These phrases may not exactly match their individual rule-set
but it will be close enough that each speaker can understand each other. So each speaker has an
individual and unique rule-base system that only slightly differs from his peers and allows for small
changes; with this a new word or phrase just has to find a rule-set that will fully allow for it to exist
and then from there it can spread by finding rule-sets that only slightly differ but will still allow it to
be valid. With this, slang can spread to be used by a majority.
Once Smith and Wilson determined that a linguistic rule-based system existed and where it
existed (within each individual), they analysed the assumption that this grammar is psychologically
real. The term psychologically real is defined as the fact that the speakers know their language and
know it unconsciously. All this analysis would be to waste without the assumption that one knows
his individual system. Its easy to prove that speakers know their language by looking at all the
children who innately gain a grasp of their native language just by hearing those around them speak

and learning it for themselves. Based on this absorption of language, Smith and Wilson argue that
speakers unconsciously refute sentences which dont make sense based on their history of linguistic
rules and acknowledge those which match their knowledge.
By proving that grammar is psychologically real, we also see that human beings naturally
have a tendency to learn language; that language all have similar patterns there exist linguistic
universals. With this last piece, Smith and Wilson formed a full illustration of the human language
and proved how it is a rule-based system. They defined the human language as a rule-based system
or a grammar which specifies what is grammatical or not and how it can be used and why. This
grammar is a partially universal construct learned and adapted by children and known by adults. By
the time one is an adult, each person has a unique set of rules defining language and how it works.