Emergent Grammar
Paul J. Hopper · 2017
This chapter focuses on the possibilities presented by the emergent grammar postulate for the discipline of linguistics, there are more general implications that take the whole question of the communicative basis of language beyond the narrower concerns of linguistics. It briefly presents some points of comparison between the two different perspectives to be known as the A-Priori Grammar Perspective (APG) and the Emergent Grammar Perspective (EG). In EG, the forms of language are seen as material entities that are passed from speaker to speaker in the form of actual utterances that are picked up, remembered, and often changed in direct analogical ways. Grammar in EG is a more scattered and less unified affair than in APG. The contrasting assumptions of APG and EG extend, of course, also to linguistics. The controlling metaphors for language and the projects of linguistics in A Priori Grammar can be said to be the code and the conduit.