1 Pragmatics in Chomsky's early writings
The first published appearance of pragmatics in Chomsky's writings is in his paper (Chomsky 1962). The knowledge of language a speaker has acquired constitutes "an implicit theory of the language that he has mastered, a theory that predicts the grammatical structure of each of an infinite class of potential physical events, and the conditions for the appropriate use of each of these items." (p. 528) Appropriateness conditions of sentences to contexts of utterance have been often claimed to form the subject matter of pragmatics, in the sense of a theory of language use (Kasher 1977, van Dijk 1977). According to Chomsky's 1973 introduction to (Chomsky 1955), "the overarching semiotic theory in which the theory of linguistic form is embedded must develop and explain how the notions constructed and applied in the investigation of linguistic form contribute to determining meaning and conditions of appropriate use." (p. 20) This is still a "thin" notion of pragmatic theory, one that has a certain theoretical objective and bears a certain relation to the theory of linguistic form.