ABSTRACT
A detailed account of the way people use language – a psycholinguistic theory – presupposes a description of what they are using – that is to say an account of language in general, and of particular languages, such as English. The discipline in which language, as opposed to its use, is studied is linguistics, and psycholinguists have frequently borrowed ideas from linguistic theory in constructing their theories of comprehension. It is for this reason that a book on psycholinguistics has a chapter primarily devoted to the work of linguists. The linguistic theories that have had the greatest influence in psychology regard syntax, or the structure of sentences, as the most important aspect of language, and place less emphasis on semantics, or meaning. This chapter is, therefore, primarily about syntax. Questions about meaning will be discussed in chapter 5, before empirical work on comprehension.
