Language Isn’t for People: On Applying Theoretical Linguistics to Practical Problems
Andrew Ortony · Review of Educational Research · 1975
This article presents evidence that many of the assumptions which underlie a great deal of work in the mainstream of modern linguistics are unsound and that the work itself is at best of only indirect value to educators, psychologists, and others who are interested in the various problems connected with language behavior. It is suggested that the efforts of most linguists who are working in the Chomsky paradigm do not yield nor are likely to yield psychologically appealing results. Linguists have tended to be too concerned with internal validity at the expense of external validity. The first section of this paper, on competence and performance, attempts to show how this imbalance leads to basic problems in an attempt to characterize sentence comprehension and results in an account which appears to ignore the fact that language is for people. The following section, on the distinction between grammaticality and acceptability, advances arguments that even the internal validity is suspect by suggesting that generative grammars cannot avoid generating grammatical sentences that could not conceivably be acceptable while at the same time failing to generate acceptable sentences which are ungrammatical. The grammars not only fail on Chomsky's original notion of adequacy but also, it