Posted: Dec 22, 2011 3:36 pm
I think American and British linguistics has generally distinguished sentences and utterances. The utterance is a physical object, written or spoken, but the sentence is an abstract or idealized product of a grammar, where 'grammar' here refers to a system which enumerates (generates) different strings of elements (words or morphemes).
It's very similar to the difference between the phonetic and the phonemic, where the first refers to actual speech, and the second to the abstract analysis into phonemes. In fact, some linguists refer to 'emic' and 'etic' as general categories in the same way.
A related contrast is between competence and performance. But many of these distinctions have become 'loaded', in the sense that the Chomskyan paradigm gave them all certain specialized meanings, and then anti-Chomskyans and post-Chomskyans have disputed this, so no doubt it has become very complex and confusing.
For example 'propositions' are distinguished by some of the more philosophical linguists; I think Jerry Fodor was doing this, until he got into discussions about natural selection.
It's very similar to the difference between the phonetic and the phonemic, where the first refers to actual speech, and the second to the abstract analysis into phonemes. In fact, some linguists refer to 'emic' and 'etic' as general categories in the same way.
A related contrast is between competence and performance. But many of these distinctions have become 'loaded', in the sense that the Chomskyan paradigm gave them all certain specialized meanings, and then anti-Chomskyans and post-Chomskyans have disputed this, so no doubt it has become very complex and confusing.
For example 'propositions' are distinguished by some of the more philosophical linguists; I think Jerry Fodor was doing this, until he got into discussions about natural selection.