Representationalism and Linguistic Knowledge

Abstract

1 Positing representations In the analysis of natural language phenomena, linguistic theories typically have recourse to representations of one form or another. Different types of representation are often posited as a means of generalising over aspects of form or interpretation as displayed in natural language constructions, and these are frequently invested with considerable theoretical significance. There are proposed representations of structure at all levels of linguistic systems: sounds, words, sentence strings, as well as representations of the meanings of words, sentences in the abstract and uttered sentences, and even representations of other people’s intentions. Such a representationalist stance was firmly set in place by Chomsky (1965) as part of, indeed the central core of, cognitive science, with language defined as a system of principles for correlating phonological representations (on some abstraction from phonetics) with some representation of interpretation (on some abstraction from denotational contents), via mappings from a central syntactic system. In such an approach, more than one level of representation may be posited as interacting in different ways with other types of representation, for example deep structure and surface structure levels of syntax of Chomsky (1965) were taken to interact in different ways with other types of representation, in particular semantics and phonology. Chomsky’s move towards the explicit representation of linguistic properties as part of human cognition came to be assumed almost universally within theoretical linguistic frameworks, whether formally characterised or This chapter in part reports work to which many people have contributed. We thank in particular, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, Matthew Purver for essential input to these developments. We also thank Andrew Gargett, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Peter Sutton, Graham White and many others for comments both over the years and in the preparation of this chapter. Research for this paper includes support from the Leverhulme Trust to the first author (XXX), and from the ESRC to the second author (YYY).