However, while the GB account does reaffirm and enrich the earlier scientific analysis of what one continues to identify pretheoretically as questions, GB as a system is nowhere concerned with questions, but permits the term "question" to exist informally, outside the theory, an unofficial historical survival from earlier theories of language.

     In general, national terms like Question have no theoretical status in the formal syntax/semantics on which present-day research tends to focus. One implication of this is that technical work today in formal syntax/semantics does not directly bear on issues in fields like translation theory that are adjacent to and can make use of results from applied linguistics. For it is in terms of national categories like Question or the Relative Clause Construction that generally accepted codifications of language structure have always been based; this goes also for the way the practitioners of language arts such as translation normally conceive of their field of work. The mismatch between modern technical linguistics and its potential users is a serious problem - an issue that later sections will address.

     Focusing on translation, but bearing in mind the broader domain of the language arts, this section tries to identify a vector in the contemporary consolidation of various lines of linguistic study that is likely to meet the needs of the practictioners of the language arts who are not professional scientists of grammar, reasonably soon if not immediately. It is suggested here that translators (and analogously other language arts practitioners) need not wait for this useful consolidation to happen, but can contribute to the overall process by trying to come up with an independent, practice-oriented formulation - drawing on whatever resources from disciplines like linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychology, and the social sciences seem reasonable and natural to them - of what one might call the substantive base of translation. These two headline sentences are clarified in the rest of this section.

     Linguistics and literary theory are centrally concerned with questions of form, structure, and the distribution of functions internal to a structure. Their legitimate concentration on these issues tends to draw them away from the content of language and discourse - from the domain of substance, content, external functions, ideology, and the real-life sources and goals of texts and conversations. The language arts have to handle language material and impart or improve language knowledge in the context of real and ever changing popular assumptions about the substance of language and of its embodiment in discourse. Thus translation, language planning (including especially term planning), language pedagogy (including both non-native and native language pedagogy, and especially the advanced levels at which the teaching / learning context provides a public forum for the popular and yet systematic investigation of grammatical and textual / literary phenomena within particular languages and across specific language boundaries), lexicography, and other language arts (such as language counseling in the press or in the form of semi-journalistic books on usage for public use) can bring to bear on the social handling of language their own substantive perspective on language, which they will have to develop, which may need to be rigorous and systematic (to ensure a high degree of usability) without degenerating into the obscure mannerisms of a technical academic expertise. Initially, it may be necessary for practitioners of each language art to develop this kind of substantive base autonomously, without help from the neighbouring arts, hoping that later these efforts will come together with each other and can jointly benefit from whatever principles and results of the linguistic and literary sciences turn out to be of real value.

     We may now turn now to linguistics. The question is whether there is any direction contemporary work is taking which leads to the expectation that the linguistic sciences will, fairly soon, come up with something that can meet the obvious needs of the language arts in general and translation in particular. We are looking for a plausible affirmative answer to this question. As in section 423.2.3., it is natural to focus on the syntactic semantic wing of linguistics. The remarks here are somewhat speculative as they reflect a particular reading of trends of research; but the conclusions are argued for, and the argument is open to inspection and assessment.