The grammar of a language is not just a long list of formal rules. A grammar may be seen as a cog-nitive achievement: it is the solution that generations of speakers of a speech community have found to structure their thoughts with the intention to communicate them to other people. As human products, the words and grammati-cal structures of a language reflect the physical, psychological and social experiences of its human creators. The dis-tinctions made by the lexicon of a language reflect important specific experiences of our lives, while the distinctions made by its grammar reflect recurren...
