Grammar, Psychology, and Indeterminacy

This chapter offers an account of what the grammarian is saying of an expression when he says it is grammatical, or a noun phrase, or ambiguous, or the subject of a certain sentence. More generally, it gives an account of the nature of a generative grammatical theory of a language-of the data for such a theory, the relation between the theory and the data, and the relation between the theory and a speaker of the language. It addresses two questions: Of what interest is a grammar? If a grammar is not, in any exciting sense, a theory of a language, why bother constructing it?.