Language Usage and Language Structure

During most of the 20th century, the classical Saussurean distinction between language use and language structure remained untranscendable in much linguistic theory. The dominant view, propagated in particular by generative grammar, was that there are structural facts and usage facts, and that in principle the former are independent of, and can be described in complete isolation from, the latter. With the appearance of

functional-cognitive approaches on the scene, this view has been challenged.Language must be understood basically as a communicative and cognitive phenomenon, it is argued, and language structure can thus only be understood in terms of cognitive and social-communicative restrictions on language use. That is, structure can only be understood as usagebased.