The Goals of Linguistic Theory Revisited

An examination is made of the original goals of generative linguistic theory. It is suggested that these goals were well defined but misguided with respect to their avoidance of the problem of modeling performance. With developments such as generative semantics, it is no longer clear that the goals are clearly defined. The authors argue that it is vital for linguistics to concern itself with the procedures that humans use in language. They then introduce a number of basic human competencies in the field of language understanding, understanding in context and the use of inferential information, and argue that the modeling of these aspects of language understanding requires procedures of a sort that cannot be easily accomodated within the dominant paradigm. In particular, the report holds that the procedures that will be required in these cases ought to be linguistic, and that a simple importation of techniques from logic may create a linguistics in which there cannot be procedures of the required sort.