It's curious how one's fingers (I am a really poor typist) have their own grammar. For example, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph I was thinking to finish with "...what that is" because, I might say, today's putatively undone thing has focus, so deserves the demonstrative pronoun. But when I looked down to perform my routine post-sentence check I noticed that my fingers had added their own view, so I had actually typed "...what that it is". Obviously it was tempting to expand that into a rococo scat on pronouns, but eventually I went with my fingers, rather than my brain. After all, I felt, the focus was a little bit overstated.
That is only the most proximate example of the phenomenon, which is just an instance of the extreme difficulty of devising adequate explanatory mechanisms for language. There is no doubt that the motor systems are involved, in speech as well as in writing, and in syntax, lexical choice, pronunciation, and spelling. Doubtless pragmatics as well, although a lot of that has to be handled elsewhere, but there's no reason why the motor systems can't intervene there as well. After all, they get the last say.
It's interesting to watch the recognition of this over time by the generativists. Initially, enormous resistance as the integrity of their grammar module was threatened. Then, sudden recognition that a whole bunch of potentially falsifying phenomena for their theory could be easily offloaded into some other "level" thus preserving their neat little bilevel theory. Epicycles, anyone?
Belief: A chemical reaction in the brain which causes people to say the equivalent of "this is true".
Faith: Belief + the knowledge that it's only a chemical reaction.
Knowledge: Belief + the belief that it isn't a chemical reaction.
Don't think about it too hard.
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