Chomsky allowed for this kind of “pragmatics” — how we use language in context — in his general theory of how language worked. Given how ambiguous language is, he had to. But he appeared to treat the role of pragmatics as peripheral to the main job of grammar. In a way, the contributions from usage-based approaches have shifted the debate in the other direction to how much pragmatics can do for language before speakers need to turn to the rules of syntax.
Usage-based theories are far from offering a complete account of how language works. Meaningful generalizations that children make from hearing spoken sentences and phrases are not the whole story of how children construct sentences either — there are generalizations that make sense but are not grammatical (for example, “He disappeared the rabbit”).
Out of all the possible meaningful yet ungrammatical generalizations children could make, they appear to make very few. The reason seems to be they are sensitive to the fact that the language community to which they belong conforms to a norm and communicates an idea in just “this way.” They strike a delicate balance, though, as the language of children is both creative (“I goed to the shops”) and conformative to grammatical norms (“I went to the shops”). There is much work to be done by usage-based theorists to explain how these forces interact in childhood in a way that exactly explains the path of language development.
At the time the Chomskyan paradigm was proposed, it was a radical break from the more informal approaches prevalent at the time, and it drew attention to all the cognitive complexities involved in becoming competent at speaking and understanding language. But at the same time that theories such as Chomsky’s allowed us to see new things, they also blinded us to other aspects of language.
