9.17.2010

Eggs or chicken, which come first?

In G. Lakoff's "Linguistics and Natural Logic", he tries to illuminate how "grammar is related to logic" with piles of examples. After reading him, I got a question about the relation between the completeness of the grammar of one language and the logic of the people who speak this language. 
Deep in the night, I got myself confused again. We all know that when people talk, especially when people speak a foreign language, it is not rare to find some ungrammatical sentences in their speech, or sometimes much worse, the surface forms are grammatical but they are still misunderstandable. According to Lakoff--"grammar is related to logic"--in this case I couldn't help wondering what leads people to the misunderstandable sentences. Is it the grammar that they are not good at or their thinkings that are illogical? Which comes first? Do people have a grammatical or ungrammatical sentence which expresses their ideas at first or do they have a logic or an logical or illogical inference in the very first seconds of their reaction?
It really sounds pretty weird to me, just like the question of eggs and chicken, which come first? One thing is for sure: they cannot appear at the same time and we have both of them.

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