Language Files Quotes

“1.2.5 Uncovering and Describing What You Know One of the jobs of linguists is to figure out all of the hidden knowledge that speakers have stored in their mental grammars: to objectively describe speakers’ performance of language and, from their performance, to deduce the rules that form the speakers’ competence. This process is analogous to a situation in which you see nurses, doctors, ambulances, and people in wheelchairs coming from a building you are unfamiliar with, and you hypothesize that the building is a hospital. You use the evidence you can see in order to draw conclusions about the internal structure of what you cannot see.”
― Department of Linguistics, Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics