No such things as nouns

Abstract

Is grammar real or it it just a concept? The following is the opening sentence of the abstract of an article in the Journal of Linguistics, of November 2005: ‘This article argues that of English adjective–noun constructions involving associative adjectives (‘associative AdjNs’), some originate in the lexicon and others in the syntax.’ There has been for many years a divide in what is meant by grammar. For the general public (and in most of the ET articles that deal with it), grammar is understood to refer to a set of abstract terms for defining the forms of words and how they are related in sentences. For some people, however, particularly some linguistics professionals in universities, it is something real to be discovered, and grammatical terms are the means of explaining it. The quotation above is an example of the latter use. If you were unfamiliar with this approach, you might initially take the word lexicon here to mean (as the entries in dictionaries indicate) a list of the words in a language, but then might wonder how a phrase can be said, as here, to ‘originate’ in the lexicon (and whether you can really use the phrase ‘the syntax’ like that).