The Mechanism of the Form-Content Correlation Process in the Paradigm of Socio-Natural Sciences

Abstract

In this chapter, I search for the mechanism correlating linguistic form with content in order to explain (in the sense of the word ‘explain’ used in empirical, i.e., natural and modern social sciences) how sentence meaning contributes to the utterance meaning. I do that against the background of two currently dominating positions on that issue: minimalism and contextualism. Minimalists regard language as a self-standing abstract system and claim that only weak pragmatic effects are involved in interpreting sentences. Contextualists believe that language can be described adequately only within a theory of language understanding and that strong pragmatic effects are also involved in interpreting sentences. The resultant controversy, presented in Sect. 1, has been pronounced by Michel Seymour the most important one in the 20th century. I begin Sect. 2 with Mario Bunge’s argument that since abstract systems cannot change by themselves and only speakers of language do, an explanatory theory of language (one looking at language from the perspective of empirical (socionatural) sciences) must concern language understanding, i.e., view language as a bio-psycho-social phenomenon. However, language understanding needs to be incorporated in the theory of language in a more fundamental way than current contextualist models do. These models assume the existence of language as self-standing, abstract structure with a list of symbol-reference pairings (Such assumption is legitimate as long as one regards such an abstraction as only a methodological device.) and model language understanding disregarding its psycho-social development process. Such assumptions, however, lead to a number of insurmountable problems. I conclude Sect. 2 by arguing that to solve these problems, as well as to be consistent with the evidence attesting to the fact that language self-organizes and self-regulates, (also reviewed in this section,), we need a model of language understanding and production to be coined within a developmental bio-psycho-social perspective. In Sect. 3, I propose a specific model of the form-meaning correlation process, based on a novel mechanism of a linguistic categorization, which is compatible with a bio-psycho-social developmental perspective advocated in Sect. 2. On this view, the utterance meaning is dependent both on the approximate conventional meaning of the construction components conveying it, and on the specific social function of the whole construction (a relevant pragmeme), which identifies feasible situation specific contents. The given construct selects one out of these options. I finish the chapter, Sect. 4, by preliminarily testing the mechanism of the form-content correlation process introduced in Sect. 3 both qualitatively and quantitatively to meet the methodological standards of empirical sciences.