Comments on Claudia Maienborn’s Paper: Linguistic Knowledge and Knowledge of the World

Abstract

To a large extent, Claudia Maienborn’s paper is concerned with the interface between world knowledge and linguistic knowledge. Notice that, in framing the issue in this manner, one already takes it for granted that there is an interface between linguistic knowledge and world knowledge, and, consequently, that these are domains that can and should be distinguished. However, I am not at all convinced that this is so. On the contrary, there is a lot of prima facie evidence in favour of the position that there is no such clear-cut distinction. However, in my comments on CM’s paper I shall not try to defend this position, which is contrary to hers. Instead, what I intend to do is make explicit some of the ways in which her arguments commit her to some quite fundamental assumptions about how language—and, more in particular, language processors—work. I regard this is as a possibly useful excercise because it may not be evident how these assumptions enter the picture. Nor is it evident that they are true. In fact, I believe that they may well be wrong, but again that is an issue that cannot be settled within the confines of this note.