L1 grammar education is internationally criticised because of its pedagogy and its curriculum content. There is a gap between linguistic theory and school grammar in which the latter rarely makes use of possibly relevant insights from the former. At the same time, linguistics itself has never seriously undertaken attempts to identify the…

A semiotic approach explains why native speakers use alternative ways to express the same linguistic or communicative function without being aware of why they choose one form over the other. The explanation uncovers an aspect of language awareness not previously explored in traditional word and sentence-oriented approaches. (19 references)…