Abstract

How does one understand a sentence, in particular its syntactic structure? We have reason to think that the competence, in particular the parser in the competence analyses the sentence, and ends up with some mental equivalent of the tree diagram. And this is the main job to be done. If competence is doing this, then it plays the main role. If Dunja admits this, how can she be an ordinarist, rather that a competentialist? If Devitt agrees with her, how can he be an ordinarist? Alternatively, further research might show that competence does also issue a verdict, and I hope this is what will happen. My reason for thinking it is that I think competence participates in other linguistic tasks, in particular in immediate linguistic understanding. The ordinarists about linguistic intuitions suggest that „given what else we know about the mind“ we should believe that ordinary human central processor can read SDs of complicated sentences with more than one embedding, and that it is just our general intelligence that deciphers them. It is argued that this proposal is quite unconvincing.