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complex communicative actions, whose communicative meaning is however construed by association (that is, juxtaposition) rather than composition. If Ann points at Bob and then at the window with the intention to communicate to him that she wants him to close it, her action is extralinguistic in that it is no compositional: the deictic symbols for "Bob" and "the window" are instead juxtaposed. Of course, she might have achieved a similar effect by producing a linguistic action like uttering "Would you please close the window, Bob?". An agent's choice between the expressive means available to her depends on several factors which we will not discuss here and allows further inferences on the part of the partner's.
2.Practical constraints on productivity. In principle, even in the absence of a compositional competence, the set of extralinguistic actions available to a community of human agents is open, that is, it has an indefinite size, as yielded by our capability of conventionalizing and learning. In practice, however, to go beyond certain limits would pose insuperable problems in terms of acquisition, memory, recognition, reasoning, etc. Thus, there often is little point in adding a new gesture which will probably be used once and never again: such accretion is more useless than impossible and, in any case, would not be productive in the same sense in which language is, that is, as an intrinsic competence feature and a consequence of compositionality.
3.Irrelevance of displacement. To point to a spatially or temporally remote frame of reference is not logically impossible in extralinguistic communication: people might, in principle, share gestures for "in the year 1962" or "in North-Western Italy". The problem is that there is no structure for the systematic generation and understanding of these expressions, such as to make it intrinsically possible to generate and understand analogous gestures for "in the year 1963, 1964, É" or "in North-Eastern, Central, Southern, É Italy", and so on. Displacement in extralinguistic communication is thus impossible, or useless, in practice, rather than in principle. This is again a consequence of its noncompositional nature.
Conclusions
Our discussion of human communicative competence and of its modes of expression is not cast at the behavioral level, because that is not the right level at which to capture these phenomena (or, for that matter, any mental phenomenon). Actions are neither intrinsically communicative nor intrinsically linguistic or extralinguistic: instead, their nature is better viewed as a matter of processing.
Communicative actions are typically made up of a complex mixture of linguistic and extralinguistic aspects. Each component of the cognitive system will process anything it can: the communicative meaning will result from the balance of these different activities.
Thus, the language module will process whatever aspect of the situation looks like language, no matter whether the input is auditory, visual (e.g., reading, reading lips, reading a sign language, etc.), tactile (e.g., Braille) etc. To say that something "looks like language" should be referred to the types of regularities that the language module can capture in the event observed. Simultaneously, other cognitive subsystems will process other aspects of the communicative situation, that will be called extralinguistic and referred to other types of regularities in the event observed.
A remarkable example of cooperation between the different subcomponent of communicative competence can be observed when we encounter a text in a foreign language we do not speak: we look for recognizable parts of the text (like words that resemble those of some language we speak) and use them to build associations and fragments of sentences, stretching our linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge to their maximum extents.
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Acknowledgments. This research was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific and Technological Research (MURST), Azione Integrata Italia/Spagna, 1999-2001.
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