What decisions do English speakers make subconsciously?

[Moonrise]

@Wendell_Wagner

If you want to learn how incredibly diverse all the languages of the world are, get a Ph.D. in linguistics. Every language has rules about what kinds of meanings it distinguishes, what rules of conjugating it uses, what rules of grammar it uses, what kinds of sounds it distinguishes from other sounds, and so on that only a few other languages use, and it has a few such differences from other languages that it’s the only language in the world that has those rules. All those rules become subconscious when someone grows up speaking it.

And more specifically Typology, which compares the grammatical systems of the world’s languages and attempts to find correlations between features (e.g. if a language has characteristic A, then it will also have characteristic B but is unlikely to have characteristic C).

It seems to me that the OP is touching on the difference between overt and covert categories.

Overt categories refer to concepts that are clearly grammatically marked in a language. For instance in English, the (regular) plural and past are marked by the -s and -ed suffixes respectively. This is the grammar that native speakers can easily explain and that foreign students learn.

Covert categories refer to rules that are not apparent, even to native speakers although they follow them perfectly. The order of adjectives mentioned above is a great example, as is the order of adpositional phrases and adverbs as well as the gender of names (Harry is masculine and Mary is feminine but nothing in the way the word is structured indicates this). When someone does not follow a covert grammatical rule, native speakers are often at a loss to describe why it’s incorrect and will often comment that it “feels” wrong or that you “just don’t say this.”

This reminds me of a very intriguing comment made by Left_Hand_of_Dorkness in another thread.

@Wendell_Wagner

… one of the things I do in the lecture is ask someone to use genuinely bad grammar. Then we analyze what they said, and invariably they’ve followed almost all the true rules of English grammar. They might say, “Me eat good food!” and I point out that sure, they used the objective pronoun instead of the reflexive pronoun, but their sentence followed standard word order (subject/verb/modifier/direct object), and the verb agreed with the noun. It’s nearly impossible to give a spontaneous example of poor grammar that violates the most basic rules. I offer them a sample sentence that looks like this:

a I like looks offer sample sentence that this

I’m sure that what is at play here is precisely the difference between overt and covert categories, with the latter being much more difficult for native speakers to break.