If language is not a system of representation, then grammar cannot be what it is usually taken to be.
Grammar is often imagined as a kind of internal architecture: a set of structures into which meanings must be fitted. On this view, grammar precedes meaning, shaping it from above, imposing order on what would otherwise be chaotic expression.
This picture is deeply misleading.
Grammar does not structure meaning. It constrains it.
That distinction matters more than it first appears.
Structure and the Illusion of Fixity
To think of grammar as structure is to imagine that meanings exist as discrete units that must be slotted into predefined forms. The forms are stable; meanings succeed insofar as they conform.
This way of thinking borrows its intuitions from formal systems. In logic, a well‑formed formula either has the right structure or it does not. In mathematics, an expression is either licit or meaningless. Structure draws a hard line between what counts and what fails.
Natural language does nothing of the sort.
Grammatical patterns in language do not determine meaning in advance. They do not prescribe what must be said. They delimit what can be said at a given moment, in a given construal, for a given purpose.
Grammar does not build meaning like a scaffold.
It channels it, like banks guide a river.
Constraint Without Prescription
A constraint restricts possibilities without specifying outcomes.
This is the crucial difference.
Grammatical systems make certain distinctions available—between process and participant, subject and complement, given and new, theme and rheme. But they do not dictate which distinctions must be drawn, nor how finely.
Consider the difference between:
She broke the vase.
and
The vase broke.
Grammar makes both construals possible. It does not decide between them. Each construal foregrounds different relations of agency, responsibility, and causality. Neither is more grammatical than the other. The choice is not structural; it is relational.
Grammar constrains meaning by making patterns of choice available, not by enforcing a single correct form.
Stability Without Fixity
One of the enduring puzzles about language is how it can be both stable and flexible at the same time. Meanings persist across speakers and situations, yet remain endlessly adaptable.
The puzzle dissolves once grammar is understood as constraint.
Stability arises locally, through repeated patterns of construal that prove useful within communities. These patterns sediment over time, becoming recognisable and shareable. But they never harden into fixed structures that determine meaning once and for all.
Grammar stabilises without freezing.
It supports recurrence without identity.
This is why linguistic systems can change gradually without collapse, and why speakers can innovate without rendering themselves unintelligible. Constraint allows variation; structure resists it.
Why Grammar Cannot Be Exhausted Formally
If grammar were structure, it could in principle be fully formalised. Every licit meaning would correspond to a well‑formed configuration.
But this aspiration has repeatedly failed—not because linguists have been insufficiently rigorous, but because grammar does not function that way.
Grammatical categories bleed into one another. Constructions overlap. Boundaries shift depending on context and purpose. Attempts to force grammar into rigid formal schemas inevitably leave remainders: usages that are perfectly meaningful yet formally awkward or anomalous.
These remainders are not noise.
They are evidence that grammar operates by constraint rather than by rule‑based construction.
Grammar as a Resource for Construal
Seen properly, grammar is a resource: a historically evolved system of options for construing experience. It does not sit above meaning; it works within it.
Speakers do not consult grammar as a codebook before speaking. They move within a space of possibilities that grammar quietly makes available, adjusting construals moment by moment as situations unfold.
Grammar does not guarantee success. It makes success possible.
And success, when it occurs, is always local: sufficient for this interaction, this purpose, this moment.
Preparing the Ground
Understanding grammar as constraint rather than structure prepares the way for several further inversions.
It explains how reference can function without representation, how meaning can precede truth conditions, and why ambiguity is not a defect but a resource. It also clarifies why formal systems can extract stable structures from language without ever exhausting it.
Grammar is not a cage that meaning must inhabit.
It is the set of pressures that make meaning doable at all.
In the next post, we will turn to one of the most stubborn philosophical problems of all—reference—and see how it changes once representation is finally set aside.
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