ABSTRACT
The editors of this book refrain from relating their study to a specific field of linguistic research, presumably because they have quite a broad perspective on the subject of translation. However, because I am invited to comment on this book from the perspective of theoretical linguistics, I dare to subsume the preceding chapters under a unifying notion. Psycholinguistics or cognitive linguistics may be sensible terms to use to cover the study of producing, understanding, processing, learning (with or without education), and losing language. Commenting on this book from the perspective of theoretical linguistics demands a reflection on the relation between these two kinds of linguistics, especially because a number of linguists assume a closer relation between cognitive psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics than I do, especially linguists working in the paradigm of generative linguistics. This entanglement of theoretical and cognitive linguistics was manifestly introduced in the linguistics discourse by Chomsky’s conception of an “ideal speaker–listener” (Chomsky, 1965: 3). The notions “speaker” and “listener” refer to a setting of language use by individuals in specific contexts. At the same time, the “ideal speaker–listener” is an abstraction of everything that characterizes an authentic speaker or listener in a specific situation, like being affected by “grammatically irrelevant conditions like memory limitations, distractions” or the like. In effect, it is a “counterfactual idealization” (cf., Botha, 1989: 65) that underlies the generative paradigm as an axiom. Counterfactual idealizations may be regarded as “methodologically expedient” (Newmeyer, 1983: 75) by supporters of a scientific paradigm, but differently from outside.
