Abstract

Wittgenstein distinguishes two areas of what he calls the “use” of a word. First, there is the application of a word in the construction of a sentence, which he calls the “surface grammar.” Second, there is a usage that goes beyond the merely verbal part of language games, the rules governing which he terms “depth grammar.” These latter rules constitute what the preliminary work for the Investigations still referred to as “logical form.” To spell out Wittgenstein's analogy a little, he must mean that, just as we are accustomed to saying the alphabet aloud in a certain way, so too are we familiar with the forms of expression of our language, for example with the subject predicate form. One became familiar with the forms in the course of originally learning how to use them ‐ that is, in learning certain ways of forming linguistic complexes at the level of content.