The creativity of language
„The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‚creativity’ of language, that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are familiar.” (Chomsky 1966)
Language is rule-governed
„... language is rule-governed. The task of the linguist in seeking to account for this creative aspect of grammatical competence is thus to formulate appropriate sets of syntactic, morphological, phonological, and semantic rules. (Radford 1988: 19)