Language, world, and cognitive processing

Abstract

Abstract The view that utterances are interpretable in terms of a wider cognitive structure is supported by the following consideration. We are faced with two related questions. First, we wonder how humans with a finite equipment of systematic means manage to achieve a meaningful interpretation with respect to an infinite variety of situations that differ qualitatively and quantitatively in myriads of ways. Secondly, we wonder how humans with a limited, finite set of cognitive means manage not only to interpret and judge an infinite welter of different real situations, but also to conjure up or imagine all kinds of situations that are not real and often could not even be real. The first question is not, or only very partially, answered by repeating the standard adage of linguistics, namely that it is possible to generate an infinite number of different sentences by means of a limited set of grammatical rules and lexical items. When one takes the point of view of Semantic Syntax, it is immediately evident that this standard answer fails to satisfy. For in this theory, grammar, though itself finite, takes as input an infinite set of possible Semantic Analyses. But even if one considers a grammar to be a primitive algorithm that generates an infinite set of sentences with the help of purely syntactic formation rules from an initial symbol, i.e. really from ‘nothing’, still the first question would not be answered. For that question is about the fact that the infinite set of well-formed sentence types does not stand in a one-one relation with the infinite set of situations in which the tokens of these sentence types are interpreted.