Language is a perfect system that satisfies the conditions imposed by the external performance/interpretive systems, but how the external systems interact with the core syntax is partially understood. With reference to Chomsky’s dichotomy of grammatical and pragmatic competences, this paper tentatively reformulates an integrated model of pragmatic competence, consisting of an internal and an external part. The former originates from the interaction of the internal syntactic submodule with external but organism-internal submodules, such as semantic, pragmatic and phonological-phonetic modules, and among three external submodules, thus creating thinking activities. The latter refers to the interaction between all organism-internal submodules and organism-external sociocultural factors, namely, mapping the computational results of the organism-internal submodules into the specific sociocultural contexts in communication. Meanwhile, this paper assumes an organism-internal pragmatic module in the Conceptual-Intentional system, providing linguistic and socio-cultural pragmatic knowledge in the operation of the internal and the external pragmatic competences, facilitating both pure thought and sociocultural communications.

How to use language properly and acquire the capacity for language use has become the focus of linguists and philosophers for centuries. Therefore, pragmatic competence underlying language use arouses enormous interests of language acquisition practitioners. This study reveals the core properties of various models or theories of pragmatic competence, such as the communicative componential models, the form-function mapping proposal of the functionalist, the tripartite cognitive model, and the current integrated model of pragmatic competence. The common core includes (but not limited to) integration of thought and communication, one uniform pragmatic mechanism, dynamic form-function mapping, and complementarity between grammatical and pragmatic competences. With the findings as a departure, a brief outline for further investigation of pragmatic competence is proposed finally, including pathological and neurobiological examination of pragmatic competence.

The exploration of pragmatic competence has been endowed with theoretical and empirical significance for half a century, yet a common framework is still under investigation from different perspectives. First, this article conducts a critical review of the investigation of pragmatic competence in communicative ability theory, the function-discourse model, the componential and meaning-driven model, and the relevance-theoretic model. Based on the merits and demerits of these proposals and their relation with Chomsky’s dichotomy of grammatical and pragmatic competences, an integrated model of pragmatic competence (IMPC) is reformulated for thought and communication, focusing on the interactions among various organism-internal submodules under the current minimalist framework and their interactions with outside sociocultural factors. Finally, a comparison is made between the integrated proposal and the theory and models.

Introduction 3. Neurobiological foundation of language 4. Classic molecular genetic examination of language 5. New approaches to genetics of language 6. Conclusions 7. Acknowledgments 8. References

Cartography, a fine-grained articulation of syntactic structures, accounts for an intensive development of the splitting tradition that aims to capture the rich empirical facts observed in cross-linguistic studies. Thus, it has the theoretical linguistic circle pondering its conceptual necessity in the current linguistic framework. Unfolding from the inception of cartography to its prospects, this interview represents a relatively overall scrutiny of both theoretical and technical details of cartography. The real purpose of the interview is to reveal the relation between cartography and the Minimalist Program (MP) on the one hand, and the contributions of cartography to MP on the other. For the former, the interview first introduces the motivations of cartography and Cinque's strong position in the methodology of cartography, and then compares the architectural differences between MP, Greenberg's typological studies, and cartography. More importantly, the different foci of cartographic maximization of syntactic structure (maximalism) and minimalist minimization of redundancies (minimalism) are expounded, which facilitates demonstration of the compatibility, rather than contradiction, between these two research programs. For the latter aspect, the interview explains the flexible proposal of cartography towards morphology, and then primarily elucidates the different opinions of these two programs regarding parametrization of functional and substantive universals in the lexicon, which paves the way for the interview to illustrate cartographic views about L1 and L2 acquisition. In addition, some potential challenges cartography faces are touched upon, along with its prospects. The interview ends with a brief analysis of two theoretical puzzles initiated by cartography.