Is the `New Sentence Problem' a Genuine Problem?

Abstract

The theoretical problem of explaining how people can produce and understand `sentences' they have never heard before has, for some time, been at the center of psycholinguistic and cognitive theorizing. It has rarely been questioned as a coherently formulated `problem' in itself. In recent years, however, a range of conceptual criticisms has been advanced from within the Wittgensteinian tradition. A consideration of these criticisms in relation to Chomsky's various formulations constitutes the main purpose of this paper. Among the critical issues discussed are: (1) the compositional theory of linguistic behavior which was developed as part of the solution to the new sentence (projection) problem; (2) the conception of linguistic comprehension which underlies it; (3) the `ideas/utterance' translation assumption; (4) the characterization of language learning embraced by the treatment of the projection problem; (5) the internal rule-system model; and (6) alternative versions of the phenomena grouped under the `new sentence problem'.

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