Rejecting the Axioms of Olde

 When I began this blog, I assumed the big step in developing language was the creation of the first word. I took it for granted that this was accomplished by yoking a sound and a meaning together to give us something likechair. I no longer believe either of those things.Today I believe that the big step towards language came when our ancestors were willing to share their knowledge, and that language began when we started pointing things out to one another.The change in my thinking resulted from a doodle I created early in the blog ’s history: the speech triangle. Its corners mark a speaker and a listener who focus joint attention on the third corner, a topic. It might seem that we could eliminate the topic and just have that as something shared by speaker and listener, but the role of joint attention forces listener and spe aker to focus on the topic rather than each other. If you try to eliminate the topic and redirect attention to the speech itself, you get pointless remarks—e.g.,this sentence is six words long—or paradoxes such as:This sentence is false. The way out of this jumble is to realize that language works by directing attention away from the fact of communication to some other topic out there in the universe or in imagination. The topic is a distinct part of the speech triangle.Embrace of the speech triangle puts an end to a search for any relevance in communication and information theory. Claude Shannon ’s information theory presents a pair, speaker and...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs