DO LINGUISTS need to get away from the library and spend more time talking? Ever since Noam Chomsky revolutionised linguistics in the 1950s, research has focused on the structures underlying grammatically correct sentences and on our astonishing ability to both generate and understand an infinity of expressions. Now two new books separately argue that the to and fro of conversation is key to understanding language. If they are right, the idea of language as a computational system needs to make some room for that of language as a tool for cooperative communication.
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