form versus meaning

[Elizabeth Bates]

The question was not whether competence should be studied -- it should.
And many sciences have to deal with indirect evidence.  My complaint had
to do with the idea that we can somehow study competence "first" and
get to the other (what Dan Everett unabashedly calls) "derivative"
phenomena later.  i don't think we can.  We have to do them together,
or it will be impossible to understand the data that are supposed to
provide insights into competence.  Grammaticality judgments, for example,
are a kind of performance, but we understand remarkably little about
grammaticality judgment as a psychological process, and for that reason,
the primary data base of generative linguistics  is sometimes pretty
shaky.  It certainly isn't sound enough to stand alone, and it is not
sound enough to serve as the core for any other avenue of study.  It is
one kind of evidence, but only one, and I am really amazed that anyone
thinks that we should pursue that avenue before anything else is done.
This is territorial imperialism. -liz bates