In order to understand the relationship between syntactic theory and how people parse sentences, it is first necessary to understand the more general relationship between the grammar and the general cognitive system (GCS). The Chomskyan view, adhered to by most linguists working within the modern generative framework, is that the grammar is a cognitive subsystem whose vocabulary and operations are defined independently of the GCS and account for the structure of language (Chomsky, 1980). Linguistics is thus the branch of theoretical cognitive psychology which explains language structure.

There is another possible relationship between the grammar and the GCS in which linguistics does not play a primary theoretical role in explaining language structure. On this view, the structure of language is explained by basic principles of the GCS – for example, the nature of concepts in interaction with basic properties of the human information processing system. If this view is correct, grammars become convenient organizational frameworks for describing the structure of language. Linguistics is then a descriptive rather than a theoretical branch of cognitive psychology. The linguistics-as-descriptive position was held by the American Structuralists and is presently being revived from a somewhat different perspective in the form of “cognitive grammar” (Lakoff, in press).

These two frameworks for understanding the relationship between grammars and the cognitive system – linguistics as explanation and linguistics as description – suggest different research strategies for answering the question posed by the theme of this book: namely, What is the relationship between syntactic theory and how listeners parse sentences?