文法這觀念對每個人有不同意義。對於衍生文法學者來講，文法是與生俱來的，是自給自足的，也是全人類通用的。對功能語法學家來講，文法只是人類所使用的諸多表達手段的其中一種。到底文法是不是一種天生的語言核心，如同衍生文法家所言，可以和語用完全脫節，可能終究還是需要心理語言學、神經語言學和生物學方面的研究來定案。在此同時，語料庫語言學仍舊是較為可靠的描述語言實際使用狀況的工具。經由語料庫的研究，許多字典得以編纂完成，許多語言結構和規則得以問世。本文將進行一項選擇性與評估性的回顧與探討，主要是以心理語言學的角度來看衍生文法學派的主張是否正確。作者主張所謂的自給自足的句法部門並不存在，將文法和語境的研究完全分離是錯誤的。雖然與生俱來的說法的確有可能，然而人腦中的文法部門仍難免受到環境和互動的持續影響和塑造。或許，文法在人類語言當中的地位，並不像衍生語言學派所以為的那麼重要。從語料庫的角度來研究文法和語言的關係，或許更貼近於事實。

Grammar means different things to different people. For generative grammarians, grammar is innate, autonomous and universal. For functionalists, grammar is just one of the many devices which humans employ to communicate their ideas in a social setting. Psycholinguistic studies, neurolinguistic methodologies and the science of biology, may provide the ultimate answer to whether there is an innate core of grammar which can indeed be clearly separated from the influence of performance factors, as generative grammarians claim. Meanwhile, corpus investigation is still a more convincing way to describe and possibly explain how language is actually used by human beings. Many dictionaries have been compiled from the exploration of corpora, many language structures studied and rules of use described. In this paper, a selective and evaluative review of research on generative grammar is offered, mainly from the psycholinguistic point of view. The main claim is that an autonomous syntactic module in the human mind as proposed by generative grammarians is unsustainable, and it is misleading to separate grammar from context in language studies. Although the innate hypothesis can be supported, grammar is constantly shaped by culture and interpersonal interactions. In the end, the place of grammar may not be so pivotal to human language as held by generative grammarians (i.e. the lexicon may be more important in language processing than rules governing sentence formation). A more viable