Transitional determinacies.

Abstract

In classic generative grammar a distinction is drawn between linguistic 'competence' and linguistic 'performance', the former referring to linguistic knowledge, the latter to how linguistic knowledge is used. However, this controversial differentiation obscures the additional dichotomy between linguistic knowledge for production and linguistic knowledge for recognition. In this article it is shown that production and recognition differ, that recognition is not simply the inverse of production, and that the derivation of production from recognition and recognition from production require a small set of generalizable 'transitional determinacies'. Secondly, it is shown that transitional determinacies explain the difference between 'overt' and 'covert' recognition recently observed in prosopagnosics, patients unable to recognize familiar faces. Prosopagnosics and normals are found to differ in their transitional determinacies, such that prosopagnosics require more binders (precisors) for covert recognition than normals. In general, it is concluded that transitional determinacies are as necessary to the theory of grammar as determinacies themselves.