Linguists have standardly assumed that grammar is about identifying all and only the 'good'
sentences of a language which implies that there must be other 'bad' sentences - but in
practice most linguists know that it is hard to pin those down. The standard assumption is no
more than an assumption. A century ago grammarians did not think about their subject that way
and our book shows that the older idea was right: linguists can and should dispense with the
concept 'starred sentence'. We draw on corpus data in order to support a different model of
grammar in which individuals refine positive grammatical habits to greater or lesser extents
in diverse and unpredictable directions but nothing is ever ruled out. Languages are not
merely alternative methods of verbalizing universal logical forms. We use empirical evidence to
shed light on the routes by which school-age children gradually expand their battery of
grammatical resources which turn out to be sometimes counter-intuitive. Our rejection of the
'starred sentence' concept has attracted considerable discussion and we summarize the
reactions and respond to our critics. The contrasting models of grammar described in this book
entail contrasting pictures of human nature our closing chapter shows that grammatical theory
is not value-neutral but has an ethical dimension.
