The psychological reality of grammar. A cognitive linguistics perspective

Abstract

The paper deals with the issue of “psychological reality” of grammar. It is claimed that a grammar is “psychologically real” to the extent it meets two criteria of psychological reality: (1) the criterion of explanatory adequacy in the sense of Chomsky (1965) and (2) the criterion of “realizability” by a psychological model of language use. The first criterion is connected with the language acquisition process – a grammar is psychologically real if it can be learned by a child, while the second, with the “explicit realization mappings” to the PDP neural model of language use – a grammar is “real” if its elements can be associated with analogous constructs in a processing model of language use.