🚀 go-pugleaf

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@verizon.net> wrote in message 
news:1188872493.332157.31480@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com...
> 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.

Chomsky showed nothing of the sort, and Skinner's is not a 
"stimulus-response" position. Skinner's book remains cogent but only 
behaviorists read it since Chomsky's "review." BTW, Chomsky never read the 
book - ask Searle.


>
>> 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.
>