LANGUAGE AS THE MAIN TOOL IN THE SERVICE OF THE MIND

The article starts from the notion of the human mind as the main topic of all branches of scientific psychology and specifies its general functions, namely, to represent the external and internal worlds and to influence and control both these worlds. Language is treated here as the best tool or medium to fulfill these functions: representational and pragmatic. A model of language knowledge as a component of the individual human mind is presented. In this model, language knowledge is composed of two competences: purely linguistic competence that fulfills the representational function, and communicative competence with its communicative (pragmatic) function. Each of these competences has its independent biological basis: Universal Grammar (UG) being a biological endowment of linguistic competence and Theory of Mind (ToM) playing the same role for communicative competence. Different genetically-based disturbances are specific for each of these competences, such as Specific Language Impairment (SLI) for language competence and autism for the communicative (pragmatic). The socio-cultural influences on the development of the two competences are realized through the acquisition of meta-linguistic and meta-pragmatic skills.