“Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.” KnowsLanguageBabyCivilizationEssentialsIngredientsSpeakers Author:Charlton Laird
“Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.” KnowsWayTurnsCommunitySituationConversationSpeechVariousAppropriateSpeakersGrammar Book:Word Play: What Happens When People Talk Source: Word Play: What Happens When People Talk
“Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.” KnowsSchoolLanguageMistakeSpeechSentencesNativeSpeakersGrammarSame Mistakes Book:Word Play: What Happens When People Talk Source: Word Play: What Happens When People Talk