Page 40 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

17 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

resented on the part of the speaker by a corresponding mental
grammar ts, at least in the first instance, consistent.
Methodological Difficulties. To be sure, serious methodological
difficulties have arisen in connection with the Chomskian program
for a general science of language as the rational reconstruction of
linguistic competence. I would like to consider, from a method-
ological perspective, two of the problem complexes that have de-
veloped. One concerns the status and reliability of the intuitive
knowledge of competent speakers; the other, the aforementioned
relation between linguistic and mental grammar.
There have been above all two objections against choosing
speakers’ intuitions as the starting point of reconstructive theory
formation.*® First, the question has been raised whether a re-
constructive linguistics can ever arrive at a theory of linguistic
competence, whether on the chosen data basis it is not, rather,
limited to developing, at best, a theory of the intuitive under-
standing that competent speakers have of their own language?
Since the metalinguistic use of one’s own ordinary language, to
which a science that appeals to speakers’ judgments must have
recourse, is something other than the direct use of language (and
is probably subject to different laws), a grammatical theory of
the Chomskian type can reconstruct, at best, that special part of
linguistic competence that rules the metalinguistic use; it cannot
reconstruct the competence that directly underlies speaking and
understanding a language.

The empirical question is whether a complete theory of linguistic intu-
itions is identical with a complete theory of human linguistic compe-
tence.... Chomsky has no doubt as to this identity.... The theory
of one kind of linguistic behavior, namely metalinguistic judgment on
such things as grammaticality and paraphrase, would then as a whole
be built into theories on other forms of linguistic behavior such as
speaking and understanding. ... If we wish to think in terms of pri-
mary and derived forms of verbal behavior, the speaking and the
understanding of language fall precisely into the category of primary
forms, while metalinguistic judgments will be considered highly de-
rived, artificial forms of linguistic behavior, which moreover are
acquired late in development.... The empirical problem in the
psychology of language is in turn divided in two, the investigation of