Abstract

This chapter describes possible positions on psychological reality, on linguistic competence, that vary according to whether or not the rules of the language are embodied in the mind; to whether or not some processing rules for language are represented in the mind; and to whether or not some processing rules operate on metalinguistic representations of syntactic and semantic properties of linguistic items. The uncontroversial minimal position — committed only to there being a psychological reality that “respects” the linguistic rules — is the most that can be sustained without some powerful psychological assumption that is independent of anything revealed by the grammar of a language.