// n.(LSG) Any generalization about the grammatical facts of a language which is, in the opinion of the linguist making the judgement, an important and independent fact about the language which needs to be separately expressed in the grammar. Inevitably, this is a subjective notion about which linguists can sincerely differ, and it is all too easy, when reading the literature, to suspect that, in practice, an LSG is a generalization which is conveniently expressible in somebody’s particular theory of grammar.
One might reasonably ask what a linguistically insignificant generalization might look like; here is a possible example: no monosyllabic English verb which begins and ends with the same consonant forms its past tense by vowel change: peep, cook, dread, suss, lull, maim and so on all form their past tenses with the suffix -ed, unlike, say, take, see or hang. Few, if any, linguists have ever suggested that this generalization is anything other than an uninteresting accident, but there appears to be no principled basis for such a view, and there is no guarantee that the next theory of grammar to come along will not point to its ability to express this generalization readily as evidence of its advantages. See the remarks under generalization, and see also epiphenomenon.
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/ n. (LSG) Any generalization about the grammatical facts of a language which is, in the opinion of the linguist making the judgement, an important and independent fact about the language which needs to be separately expressed in the grammar. Inevitably, this is a subjective notion about which linguists can sincerely differ, and it is all too easy, when reading the literature, to suspect that, in practice, an LSG is a generalization which is conveniently expressible in somebody’s particular theory of grammar. 
