🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 3, 9:17 pm, Doug Morse <mo...@edoug.org> wrote:
> Hi Glen,
>
> >  What is "language"? This is not a rhetorical question.
>
> A highly-symbolic system of representation, for the most part unique
> to humans, that allows individual experiences to be classified,
> stored, and shared (communicated).  

So your position is that thought cannot occur without language. I
don't think linguists or psychologists would agree.

>It is my understanding that almost
> all languages use NVO (noun-verb-objects) conjunctions to accomplish
> this representation.  

"noun" and "object" can't occur in the same level of representation.
One is a "part of speech," i.e. a morphological category, the other a
semantic relation. You could say subject-verb-object (and all the
possible permutations of the three components occur in the world's
languages, some of them very rare), or noun-verb-noun ("verb" is used
at both levels), or better "noun phrase - verb phrase."

> In a great many languages, the particular form
> of the linguistic symbols is arbitrary.

Eh? Name a "language" in which it's not "arbitrary," and you've named
something that's not a human language. (Every language has a handful
of onomatopoeic forms, but they comprise a very small part of the
vocabulary.)

> > > Does language build on a conceptual system?
>
> >  Mainstream (lame) philosophy and psychology would, I think, say "yes." I
> >  would not.
>
> Excellent!  I'm VERY curious as to why?
>
> > > Or perhaps
> > > concepts emerge from or are a byproduct of linguistic representation
> > > and processing?
>
> >  What is "linguistic representaion"? What is "processing"?
>
> 1. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and any other type of language
> element as represented in the mind/brain.  2. Mental/cognitive
> operations with these representation, such as parsing a text and/or
> integrating a parsed text with one's prior knowledge.
>
> > >Most of all, what is a good definition of "concept"
> > > or "conceptual representation and processing", especially from a
> > > psychological, neuroscience, and linguistic point of view?  I find
> > > that these research areas routinely invoke the notion of concepts and
> > > conceptual processing, but a decent definition of them -- let alone a
> > > solid one -- seems terribly elusive.  So, thoughts and sources on this
> > > would be great to hear about.
>
> >  The notion of "concept" is generally invoked when the stimuli controlling
> >  behavior

Maybe the single most important contribution of Noam Chomsky to
linguistics happened in 1959 and had little or nothing to do with the
"transformational-generative grammar" he was just beginning to
develop. He showed that behaviorism -- specifically, Skinner's *Verbal
Behavior* -- was unable to explain anything about human language.
Language is _not_ an example of stimulus and response.

> cannot be divided into cut-and-dried categories, and where an
> >  animal or person responds in a particular way to stimuli it has never seen
> >  before but which nevertheless are called "X" by people. So, when a person is
> >  shown a picture of, say, a tree, that the person has never seen before, we
> >  say "They have  concept of tree." This is simply a description of behavior.
> >  How do you "give someone (or animal) a "concept of tree"?
>
> So, this to me is what I would call categorization.  Let me ask, then:
> How would you differentiate between concepts and categories?

Again, not a question of linguistics.