Language and Imagination

What is language? The answer seems obvious until you think about it. Is language a set of rules that describe a particular tongue? If so, where are those rules? If the rules are in the heads of speakers, how did they get there? If speakers were taught the rules by their elders, how could language have begun? As Bertrand Russell said, we can hardly imagine some prehistoric parliament where people agreed on what words to use for what.If, as we just saw, a line of reasoning about human behavior suggests the activity could never have had a beginning, there may be something wrong with the reasoning. I have been reading a book byDaniel Dor,The Instruction of Imagination, which offers a different approach to the nature of language.We can follow Dor ’s logic by considering what I call the speech triangle: a speaker and a listener paying joint attention to a topic. Dor does not use the term joint-attention; he prefersintersubjectivity. The terms are similar, but (as I get it) joint-attention refers to the state of two or more minds while intersubjectivity refers to what is going on between the minds.Suppose Alphonse is telling Bertrand about his concerns about his daughter and a man she has been seeing. As Dor would put it, the two  are in an intersubjective relation maintained by the words, speech rhythms and syntax used. These things exist out there in the real world, ready to be overheard by an eavesdropper or recorded by a microphone. In other words, the relation is maintained ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech Therapy Authors: Source Type: blogs