Abstract

Noam Chomsky equates an individual’s idiolect with a hypothesized psychological structure, an “I-language”, which the competent speaker/hearer “tacitly knows” or “cognizes” via “mental representations” of syntactic principles. Just what do these claims amount to? And what grounds are there for believing them? I attempt to pin down Chomsky’s evolving commitments regarding the relation between an I-language and the performance systems that are involved in comprehension and speech. This in turn raises issues about the empirical methodology and naturalistic credentials of Chomsky’s “cognitivist” conception of language. I then discuss Michael Devitt’s “Linguistic Conception,” a contemporary descendent of nominalism, according to which language consists of concrete entities—inscriptions, acoustic blasts, and the like. Devitt argues that linguists describe certain properties of these entities—e.g., grammaticality and entailment—that allow them to play a role in communication. Both approaches face non-trivial difficulties. Chomsky’s view awaits an articulation of the relation between grammars and neurophysiological mechanisms. Devitt’s requires a more detailed account of public language conventions and a satisfactory strategy for paraphrasing away apparent references to unvoiced and abstract elements of syntactic structure—empty categories. Finally, I argue that Devitt is right to distinguish a competence from its outputs, and hence linguistics from psycholinguistics. Keywords cognitivism, nominalism, E-language vs. I-language, idiolect, structural description, tacit knowledge, competence vs. performance, parsing, internalism (see also: individualism), Michael Devitt, conventions, empty categories (see also: unvoiced elements, phonologically null constituents), outputs of competence, the Linguistic Conception, supervenience, discovery procedures, Representational Thesis (RT)