Hacia un principio de complementariedad en lingüística

generative and systemic-functional theories may be conceived as scientific theories: they have confirmed hypotheses, they provide explanations, and based on these explanations, they make predictions. nevertheless, both theories use incompatible assumptions about the same object: language. after analyzing the problem of confirmations and explanations in linguistics, this incompatibility will be treated in terms of ？a principle of complementarity？: language is, simultaneously, a ？faculty of the mind？ and a ？product of culture,？ but both aspects (the ？mental？ and the ？cultural？) cannot be captured by any single theory.