Background
Jean Émile Gombert, who teaches genetic psychology at the University of Dijon, states that it is one thing to find an adequate way of treating the comprehension and production of language and it is quite another to succeed in adopting a reflexive attitude with regard to language objects and their manipulation. It is this second task that a recently developed psycholinguistic tradition has given the name metalinguistics.1 Linguist Noam Chomsky defines the field of metalinguistics as the subject's knowledge of the characteristics and functioning of language or, from a more functionalist perspective, of its structure, its functioning and its usage.1 The relevant psychological description cannot be made in the abstract. It requires that researchers and theorists widen their focus to the point where they can embrace the significance of behavioral acts in the cognitive context of subjects who perform them. French linguist Jules Gilliéron wrote: 'All awareness is necessarily "meta" from the point of view of the observer. It bears not on the real but on the intelligibility of the real.'1
Read more about this topic: Metalinguistics
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