The Grammar of Behavior as a Theoretical Notion

Many researchers of human behavior lack empirical data in the form of descriptions of actually observed behaviors and their generalizations. Fictional narratives could be used as a source of empirical descriptive data, and their analysis naturally results in the formulation of some "grammar of behavior." The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility to use the notion of behavioral grammar in a strict scientific sense. Since the notion of grammar comes from linguistics, the article starts by comparing different linguistic approaches to the understanding of grammar. Then it explores how the concept of grammar is used outside of linguistics, in notions of "grammar of behavior," "grammar of society," and "grammar of culture." Any linguistic grammar explicitly or implicitly contains theoretical ideas about what language is in general, offers some typology of language elements, and some rules which can be conceptualized rather differently (prescriptions and proscriptions, distributions, algorithms, schemes, templates). A grammar of behavior also presupposes a certain theoretical view of behavior: how it is generated, where its forms come from, how they are assimilated and chosen, etc. However, not every theory of behavior can be understood as grammar. A grammar of behavior is that part of a theory that describes behavior, explains it by formulating rules, by specifying what is necessary, typical, possible, and what is atypical or impossible. A model of behavioral grammar extracted from fiction corpora can be based on Lewinian theory of behavior, and understood as a set of generalized descriptions of typical persons' behaviors in typical  psychophysiological conditions and typical circumstances.