For the same reason that driving is rule-governed, or the legal system is rule-governed. Just like you have to have rules to get anywhere without getting in an accident... common rules for who yeilds to whom for instance... and just like you have to have rules in a society to know where your rights end and another's start, so that people don't just kill each other for offenses for instance... You have to have common ground to communicate. If we all had different words for the color "pink" for instance... how would we describe something so that someone else would understand? We could describe it for ourselves, sure... but we couldn't communicate that idea or that knowledge to anyone else.
One reason for the rules is that other people have to be able to learn the language. Children can learn the rules through practice and observation... but especially for foreign language learners, there has to be a codified way to explain how the language works. The funny thing is that language isn't based on rules... it doesn't start out that way. We don't decide as we're creating language that i goes before e except after c, and in these certain other exceptions. Language is based on usage. We make up the rules afterward to decribe how it works. So, saying that it is rule-governed is only partly true. The language is changing all the time, and the rules don't dictate how it can change. People do... in the way they talk and the slang they make up, and the way they shorten words or add bizarre endings to things, or borrow words from other languages. That's why we have so many bizarre and contradictory rules... because some endings came from one language, some from another... and we have to try to incorporate the rules from a lot of different languages into ours... plus the indiosyncracies that we add on our own.
Answered by
Sharad Singh
at
6:26 PM on October 21, 2008