Language in the mind

This chapter addresses the dialectic relation between E (= external) language and I (= internal) language. On the one hand, E-language is the product of the I-language of individual speakers; at the same time, the I-language of individual speakers is the product of their exposure to E-language. Given this relation, it is argued that certain features of E-language need to be incorporated into, and form an essential part of I-language: the frequency of occurrence of its various items, their collocations and co-occurrence patterns, their contextual situatedness, and the ubiquity of the idiomatic and the formulaic. I use the metaphor of the 'mental corpus' as a way of characterizing the nature of what it is that speakers of a language have learned and what they access in language performance. The approach is contrasted with what is perhaps the dominant view of I-language, which seeks to compartmentalize linguistic knowledge into the lexicon and a set of rules for combining items from the lexicon.