Saussure proposed the division language/parole and argued that language can be studied as a formal system. Fifty years later Chomsky declared competence the core interest of linguistics. Although for years Generative second language acquisition (GenSLA) has adopted this view, a number of recent publications poke holes into the competence bubble.…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

Discussion of two basic conceptions: Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea of language as energeia'' existing within and without man, and Noam Chomsky's idea of language generated by the speaker according to an innate apparatus. Revised version of lectures presented at the University of Bonn, West Germany in August 1971. (RS)

A study of the meanings of "generation," a popular term in current rhetorical jargon, reveals important developments in the art and theory of rhetoric. As now used, it refers without clear distinction to rule-governed, heuristic, and trial-and-error procedures. The rule-governed procedures of transformation grammar are being employed to…

Earlier version of this paper was read at the Kansas Regional Linguistics Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, October 1968. (DS)

This paper discusses the validity and role of linguistic theory in terms of philosophy and logic and considers the relationship among these fields of human knowledge. The main objective of linguistic science is to discover the composition laws actually used by speech communities at any given moment in history. Linguistics is therefore not…

Prior to 1959, Chomsky was a formalist. He retains a formalism in his mentalistic theorizing; he denies that the competence process has a correlate in speakers. Because he has based rules, grammar organization and derivations on the non-psychological process, they are not generally psychologically valid. (Author/RM)

Suggests that, although pragmatic theory is like grammatical theory in that it seeks full explicitness and is pitched at the level of subpersona systems, it is unlike grammatical theory in that it is an account of performance mechanisms rather than of knowledge systems (competence). (Author/VWL)

The effect of sentence complexity on the ability of 40 trainable mentally retarded mongoloids (median IQ 34.3) to comprehend and imitate verbally presented strings was examined in two studies. Comprehension ability was tested by asking each subject to indicate which of two pictures was being described in the sentence spoken by the examiner. Eight…

This paper argues that Chomsky's and Halle's restriction on the features [+high, +low] are too severe; that this restriction is inconsistent with the generative treatment of affricates, laterally-released stops, and prenasalized stops; and that the restriction is inconsistent with the notion that linguistic descriptions are abstract theories about…

Thirty informants were presented with sets of clauses punctuated as in the pattern "S1. If S2. S3" and asked which clause, S1 or S3, the "if" clause modified. Independently, several linguists judged the sentences "S1, if S2" and "S2, if S3" acceptable. Missing intonational clues or improper punctuation,…

The major approaches to language teaching (audiolingual method, generative grammar, Community Language Learning and Silent Way) are investigated to discover whether or not they are compatible in structure with an information-processing model of memory (IPM). The model of memory used was described by Roberta Klatzky in "Human Memory:…