ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the knowledge that underlies our ability to use and understand language. Language is the basis for communicating information, both in immediate face-to-face conversations and in the longer-lasting form of written records. Yet despite this universal drive for communication, there is the paradoxical fact that there are many thousands of different human languages, each of which is an impenetrable barrier to free communication. Chomsky's claim that it is linguistic knowledge which accounts for a native speaker's ability to produce and understand language was one of the main spurs to the development of psychologists' concern with knowledge representations. Homsky's theory seemed to offer psychologists a perfect model of the knowledge required to speak a language. However, it is generally true to say that attempts to express linguistic knowledge solely in terms of syntactic rules have run into the ground, smothered by the complexities of the rules and exceptions of any human language.
