What is a grammatical rule?
Dieter Mindt · 2002
Grammarians have always stated the regularities of languages in the form of grammatical rules. The concept of ‘grammatical rule’ is taken for granted without asking questions such as: (1) When can we be confident of having discovered a grammatical rule? (2) What is the place of exceptions and errors in the description of language? (3) What inferences can be drawn for language change from the structure of a grammatical rule? Corpus linguistics sheds some new light on these questions. There is one important feature which characterises the standard form of a grammatical rule. Of the many possible realisations, only three make up the core of an individual grammatical phenomenon. The paper describes the form of the standard rule using examples from morphology, syntax and semantics. A clear borderline can be drawn between grammatical rules and the behaviour of lexical elements. The data provide a new perspective on cases that are traditionally described as exceptions, errors, obsolete uses and emerging tendencies and give new insight into the processes of language change.