Page 41 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

18 Communication and Evolution of Society

psychological factors in primary language usage, and the psychological
investigation of linguistic intuitions.%®

I think this objection is based on a confusion of the two research
patadigms elucidated above, the empirical-analytic and the re-
constructive, to which I shall address the three following remarks.
1. Reconstruction relates to a pretheoretical knowledge of
competent speakers that is expressed in the production of sen-
tences in a natural language, on the one hand, and in the ap-
praisal of the grammaticality of linguistic expressions, on the
other. The object of reconstruction is the process of production
of sentences held by competent speakers to belong to the set of
grammatical sentences. The metalinguistic utterances in which
competent speakers evaluate the sentences put before them are
not the object of reconstruction but part of the data gathering.
2. Because of the reflexive character of natural languages,
speaking about what has been spoken, direct or indirect mention
of speech components, belongs to the normal linguistic process
of reaching understanding. The expression metalinguistic judg-
ments in a natural language about sentences of the same language
suggests a difference of level that does not exist. It is one of the
interesting features of natural languages that they can be used
as their own language of explication. (I shall come back to this
)
point below.
3. However, it seems to me that the misunderstanding lies,
above all, in Levelt’s considering the recourse to speakers’ intu-
itions in abstraction from the underlying research paradigm. Only
if one presupposes an empirical-analytic (in the narrow sense)
approach to the reality of a natural language and the utterances
in it, can one view speaking and understanding language, on the
one hand, and judgments in and about a language, on the other,
as two different object domains. If one chooses a reconstructive
approach, then one thereby chooses a conceptualization of the
object domain according to which the linguistic know-how of a
competent speaker is at the root of the sentences he produces
with the help of (and only with the help of) this know-how.
While this research paradigm may prove to be unfruitful, this
cannot be shown at the level of a critique that already presup-