The other side of language: Pragmatic competence

Language pathology has traditionally been concerned with deficits in left-hemisphere-based linguistic competence, namely, in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It has become increasingly apparent over the past twenty years that linguistic competence is not sufficient for normal verbal communication. Right-hemisphere-based pragmatic competence is at least equally necessary. As a result, on the one hand, neuropsychologists have been investigating pragmatic deficits, and on the other, language pathologists have been using aphasic patients' preserved pragmatic abilities to help them compensate for their deficits in linguistic competence. From the viewpoint of linguistic theory, there is now an external justification for treating sentence grammar independently of pragmatics.