ABSTRACT
This chapter could also be entitled: cognitivism versus pragmatism in contemporary psycholinguistics, or simply the main controversies in this discipline as I see them. I have chosen the title Representational and communicative aspects as two facets of contemporary psycholinguistics because I treat these two notions-representation and communication-as the fundamental notions for any approach to language studied within this domain. Human language-a system of signs and rules governing their organization-serves as a medium of representation of the external world in human minds as well as a medium of communication among people. The two central themes for psycholinguistic research which have been proposed, linguistic competence (Chomsky, 1965) and communicative competence (Hymes, 1972), I see related to these functions. Let us look briefly at how these two basic functions of natural language have been understood over the 50 years of the history of psycholinguistics. By natural language is meant the system which has evolved through biological evolution.
