Lexical Phonology and Psychological Reality

Abstract

As Noam Chomsky has stated on several occasions, the main thrust of the generative revolution in linguistics was the shift of focus from the conception of language as an external phenomenon to language as linguistic knowledge, which is a mental phenomenon. To Structuralists, linguistics was a branch of the study of human societies; to Chomsky, it is a branch of the study of the human mind. This shift of focus from the society (the set of conventions used by a speech community) to the individual was accompanied by a corresponding shift in the kinds of data that linguists examined: instead of concentrating on samples of recorded utterances (CORPUS, or the linguistic forms produced by a language community) as the data, generative linguists, like other psychologists, started examining speaker BEHAVIOUR in order to understand the mental phenomena that underlie behaviour. Evidence for the construction of linguistic descriptions was no longer what occurred or didn’t occur in the corpus, but how speakers behaved, when confronted with a linguistic form (speaker judgments on acceptability), when producing linguistic forms (language production), when understanding linguistic forms (language comprehension), etc.