Formal Grammar Is Not Meaning Insurance
Formal grammar is often treated as a guarantee: if an expression is well-formed, meaning should follow. When meaning fails to appear, the failure is attributed to pragmatics, performance, noise, or users.
This assumption mistakes inclination for ability.
Meaning requires readiness. Grammar does not supply it.
Inclination Without Ability
Recall the distinction:
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Inclination: the organised tendencies of a system — rules, constraints, generative procedures.
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Ability: the system’s capacity to actualise symbolic value in relation — its remaining potential space.
Formal grammars encode inclination with extraordinary precision. They are highly effective at stabilising possibility.
But inclination alone does not guarantee ability.
A system may continue to generate perfectly well-formed expressions long after its symbolic capacity has collapsed.
This is not a failure of grammar. It is a misuse of it.
Universal Grammar Revisited
In The Exile of Grammar, we saw how Universal Grammar was elevated from a modelling hypothesis to an ontological primitive.
UG promised stability: a fixed internal system that could generate language independently of experience, relation, or history.
What this move obscured was readiness.
When acquisition, variation, or use resist explanation, the problem is mislocated — treated as noise at the margins rather than as signals of readiness failure.
Grammar continues. Meaning falters.
Formal Semantics and the Illusion of Sufficiency
Formal semantics extends this pattern.
Truth conditions, compositional rules, and model-theoretic mappings stabilise internal coherence. They preserve inclination with remarkable elegance.
Yet it is entirely possible — and increasingly common — for expressions to satisfy all semantic constraints while remaining symbolically inert.
They are interpretable in principle, yet meaningless in practice.
What is missing is not reference, but relational uptake.
Semantics without readiness produces symbols that point, but do not engage.
Rule-Based Models and Persistent Collapse
Rule-based linguistic and computational models are especially revealing.
Such systems can:
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parse indefinitely,
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generate endlessly,
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remain internally consistent under extreme abstraction.
And yet they frequently fail to produce meaning that matters.
They exhaust potential space faster than they can replenish it.
Grammar keeps functioning. Meaning drains away.
Grammar as Readiness-Sensitive Resource
The mistake is not grammar itself, but its ontological promotion.
Grammar is not:
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a substance,
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a deep structure of reality,
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a self-sufficient engine of meaning.
Grammar is a resource.
It stabilises possibility under conditions of sufficient readiness. When readiness collapses, grammar becomes brittle, repetitive, or empty — not because it is wrong, but because it is being asked to carry what it cannot.
This reframes grammar as:
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powerful but conditional,
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generative but not exhaustive,
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formal without being metaphysical.
Rescuing Grammar From Metaphysics
Once grammar is released from ontological duty, it can be reclaimed as a disciplined modelling practice.
Grammar does invaluable work:
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coordinating expectation,
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constraining interpretation,
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preserving shared symbolic space.
But it does not create meaning on its own.
Meaning emerges only when grammatical inclination meets relational ability.
The tragedy of The Exile of Grammar was not that grammar was taken seriously, but that it was taken alone.
By restoring readiness to the picture, grammar is rescued — not discarded — and meaning is returned to the space where it belongs: relation, horizon, and accountable construal.
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