s and on grammar–and the more one zooms in, the less reliable the description can become. So for example, from space, the coastline of Japan is pretty easy to describe. It doesn’t change noticeably over time, at least not the timescales we are concerned with. It’s the same with general grammar descriptions: one could examine a large corpus and say, with confidence, that subjects precede predicates in English X percent of the time. However, the closer one gets, the more detailed, the less one can be confident that the representation is accurate in all cases or over time. “Zooming in” on a particular writer doesn’t tell us very much–it’s not very useful as a map of the language–since idiosyncrasies of style vary greatly between writers.
The more we zoom in, the more discrete features we can see, but the less reliable their descriptions can become, and the more exceptions become apparent.
I am currently sitting in my office, which should be situated in the empty rectangular field at the center of this Google Map satellite photo. It’s not, of course, because the building I’m in is relatively new. Maps at this scale are often full of such mistakes, since they are relatively detailed, and features at this level change more often. With current technology, and depending on the area, Google maps can be several years out of date–just like very precise grammars and lexical frequency lists can become obsolete quickly as well.
Zooming in to sentence level reveals even more divergence, since individual utterances are often marked in relation to standard grammar usage–and anyway, are also affected by other factors including local usage, social context, etc. Languages change, and the closer one gets to real, meaningful language in use, the more drastically and quickly they can change. To the point, even, that worrying too much about grammar rules at “street level” begins to seem a bit mad.
We use maps as tools to learn how to get around–but we also get around to learn how to get around. We don’t endlessly study maps and then expect to get from A to B without a problem, because we understand that no map can ever be perfectly detailed. There will always be features of the real world that cannot be described easily, or that change too often, for maps to be our only tool. The best way to learn how to get around is to combine map-reading knowledge with the actual experience of getting around… just like the best way to learn a language is to be able to refer to grammar when needed, yes, but also to just get out there and communicate when that is the best option–which is more often than we may tend to think.