Essence Of Language Research Articles

Essence and Phenomenon in Linguistic Content and Expression

Essence – phenomenon and content – expression pairs comprise a net of interpenetrations in any language. The picture gets more complicated when the hierarchy of essence, phenomenon, content and expression is viewed on three levels of language generalization – in language in general, in a specific language and in an individual one. The phenomenon of the content of language in general and the essence of the content of an individual language, the phenomenon of expression of language in general and the essence of the expression of an individual language coincide in their order but not always in volume. There exists a relationship of possibility and reality between the essence of language in general and the phenomena of expression on the one hand and the essence of the individual language and the phenomena of expression on the other hand. It can be concluded that language in general and the individual language come closer not only in the phenomenon of the former and the essence of the latter, but, what is more remarkable, in the essence of the former and the phenomenon of the latter.

Much Ado About Nothing? Some Comments on B. F. Skinner's Definition of Verbal Behavior.

Some have suggested that the definition of verbal behavior offered by B. F. Skinner (1957) fails to capture the essence of language insofar as it is too broad and not functional. In this paper, I argue that the ambiguities of Skinner's definition are not an indictment of it, and that suggestions to the contrary are problematic because they suffer a critical error of scientific reasoning. Specifically, I argue that (a) no clear definition of verbal behavior is possible because there is no natural distinction between verbal and nonverbal behavior; (b) attempts at an immutable definition are essentialistic; and (c) Skinner's functional taxonomy of language is in no way affected by the particulars of any definition of verbal behavior.

Language, communication and information flow in entrepreneurship

This paper examines language, communication and information flow in entrepreneurship. Language is considered to be a key to the heart of a people and communication is the essence of language. The substance of communication is, therefore, information. Knowledge of information and access to it is considered very necessary for the establishment, survival and growth of any business organisation. Therefore, information flow in this economic-driven world is very crucial to entrepreneurs all over the world. The theoretical framework of the paper is hinged on Crystal (1987), which conceptualises language as having, perhaps, ‘magical and mystical’ and ‘unique role in capturing the breath of human thought and endeavours’. Many studies have led to the significant insights into the nature of, and the relationship between language and thought. Such relationship shows that language is the vehicle for thought or business ideas. Although verbal, non-verbal and written media of communication have been extensively engaged in the past, however, the inventions and introduction of telecommunications, computer network technology and internet have tremendously enhanced communication in real-time. The paper recommends that there is the growing need for entrepreneurs to acquire new information and communication technologies which have made the entire world to become a “global village” for the enhancement of their businesses because former communication means have become obsolete. The paper concludes that entrepreneurship spirit or drive, which is supported with effective linguistic and communicative knowledge and function in conjunction with the ICT, is the answer to the economic development and survival in the global entrepreneurship competitiveness. Key words: Language, communication, information and communication technology, entrepreneurship, information flow, business, relationship.

Mendesain Bahan Ajar Bahasa Indonesia untuk Tujuan Akademis

Article on how to design Indonesian language course material for academic purposes discusses some aspects necessary to be understood in designing the materials used by students at university level. Understanding of language essence, academic competence, appropriate course materials, and effective learning process covering the three stages of accountability model according to Moore, and the seven textuality criteria according to Rankema, is ablsolutely needed to be able to design good course materials. Article also includes a model structure of learning academic paragraph writing and academic essay.

The Essence of Language as Saying: The Essential Truth of Being

The Essence of Language as Saying: The Essential Truth of Being

Ricœur and Saussure: On meaning and time

This paper attempts to arrange a meeting between Ricœur and Saussure through their texts. Ricœur's reading Saussure reflects a particular limitation of his time, i.e., the structuralism to which we are no longer confined. He criticizes Saussure from a semantic point of view by appealing to the notion of discourse. According to Meschonnic, the discovery in 1996 of a manuscript of Saussure regarding the double essence of language reveals a particular interest in this notion, warranting a revisiting of Saussurean thought and thus reopening a debate on the status of meaning. Ricœur regards the question of meaning as a moment of self-understanding, situated outside the semiotic system in the world of signification. Saussure suggests defining the value of a linguistic unit in relation to its surrounding units. Where the former searches outside the linguistic unit, the latter searches around it: both refuse to remain, as it were, inside it. In this paper, I suggest that they were to be at odds with the question of time when raising the question of meaning. Eager to grasp a meaning that changes from one moment to the next, they relied on notions of system or context to regulate semantic diversity.

Essential properties of language, or, why language is not a code

Despite a strong tradition of viewing coded equivalence as the underlying principle of linguistic semiotics, it lacks the power needed to understand and explain language as an empirical phenomenon characterized by complex dynamics. Applying the biology of cognition to the nature of the human cognitive/linguistic capacity as rooted in the dynamics of reciprocal causality between an organism and the world, we can show language to be connotational rather than denotational. This leaves no room for the various ‘code-models’ of language exploited in traditional linguistics. Bio-cognitive analysis leads to deeper insights into the essence of language as a biologically based, cognitively motivated, circularly organized semiotic activity in a consensual domain of interactions aimed at adapting to, and, ultimately, gaining control of the environment. The understanding that cognition is grounded in the dynamics of biological self-organization fits both the integrational model of communication and distributed cognition. A short discussion of the key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpretation, intentionality, communication, and reciprocal causality is offered, showing that the notion of ‘code’ is only misleadingly applied to natural language.

Psychopathology and the essence of language: the interpretation of aphasia by Kurt Goldstein and Roman Jakobson

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the research on aphasia carried out by the linguist Roman Jakobson and the neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein. The linguistic theory of aphasia advocated by Jakobson in the 1950s and 1960s is based on clinical case studies reported by Goldstein at the beginning of the 1930s. However, Jakobson used Goldstein's clinical observations without taking into account his theoretical work on language pathology. In particular, Jakobson fed the symptoms described by Goldstein into a structuralist model, allowing him to predict different types of aphasia deductively. Goldstein, however, saw the clinical manifestations of aphasia as a particular way of being in the world. By studying the changes associated with the patient's reaction to the disease, Goldstein wanted to reach an understanding of language functioning in the normal subject. He distinguished between an instrumental use and a symbolic use of language, the latter mainly characteristic of language use in the normal subject. Only a symbolic use reveals the essence of language by showing its intimate nature, the psychic link tying the subject to the world.

How to Live Naturally and not be Bothered by Economy

Markedness plays a central role within Natural Morphology and, more generally, in any functionalist approach to language. This is not intended to deny that other forces, more or less conflicting or competing with markedness, may also play a role in shaping a natural language. However, the main concern of this paper is that identifying naturalness, namely what promotes the true nature of a thing, amounts to grasping the teleology of (any module of) a language grammar. Concepts such as frequency or economy do not provide by themselves any deep insight into the essence of language, unless they are taken in the right perspective of being in a way symptoms of naturalness. In particular, economy must be related to markedness reduction in order to capture its role within the architecture of grammar.

How to Live Naturally and not be Bothered by Economy

Markedness plays a central role within Natural Morphology and, more generally, in any functionalist approach to language. This is not intended to deny that other forces, more or less conflicting or competing with markedness, may also play a role in shaping a natural language. However, the main concern of this paper is that identifying naturalness, namely “what promotes the true nature of a thing”, amounts to grasping the teleology of (any module of) a language grammar. Concepts such as frequency or economy do not provide by themselves any deep insight into the essence of language, unless they are taken in the right perspective of being in a way symptoms of naturalness. In particular, economy must be related to markedness reduction in order to capture its role within the architecture of grammar.

Cognitive linguistics, biology of cognition and biosemiotics: Bridging the gaps

Against the background of the emerging holistic view of language based on physicalism (the embodiment of mind) and an understanding that language is a biological phenomenon rooted in semiosis as the experience of life, it is argued that a new philosophical framework for cognition and language is currently taking shape. This philosophy is best characterized as a synthesis of ideas developed in cognitive linguistics, semiotics and biology. These ideas bear directly on autopoiesis as the theory of the living which possesses a greater explanatory power as it assumes the experiential nature of language. Autopoiesis allows for deeper insights into the essence of language which is viewed as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism involving a meaning system constituted by signs of signs, thus making unification of (humanistic) science an attainable goal.

On the essence of language: the metaphysics of language and the essencing of the word; concerning Herder's treatise On the origin of language

On the essence of language: the metaphysics of language and the essencing of the word; concerning Herder's treatise On the origin of language

Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition

Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Michael Tomasello demonstrates that we don't need a self-contained instinct to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities. Tomasello argues that the essence of language is its symbolic dimension, which rests on the uniquely human ability to comprehend intention. Grammar emerges as the speakers of a language create linguistic constructions out of recurring sequences of symbols, children pick up these patterns in the buzz of words they hear around them. Constructing a Language offers a compellingly argued, psychologically sound new vision for the study of language acquisition.

Speaking My Mind: Just Another Hand-Me-Down? From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, by Michael C. Corballis. 2002. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 272 pp., $27.95.

In From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language Michael Corballis provides an engaging, highly readable and provocative account of the evolution of human language. The primary thesis of his book is that language evolved from manual and facial gestures rather than from animal vocalizations, as is often assumed. While this point of view has been expressed by others during the last few centuries (for example, Condillac in 1747), it has never been argued more forcefully and with as much supporting scholarly evidence. (I suspect that it has also never been argued with greater use of hand/mouth adages, clichés and puns.) Among the more provocative ideas is the suggestion that human speech, like writing, was a cultural invention subsequent to gestural language rather than the evolutionary essence of language.

Therapeutic Effects of Buddhism's Sasimsagwan Meditation on Reducing Depression of Nursing Students

According to a discipline of Buddhist philosophy, cognitive understanding is believed to be based above all on the name (general concept) under the assumption that understanding is controlled by language. Hence, the discipline proposes Sasimsagwan (a thorough and deep insight on 4 things, i.e. name, thing, one's real nature and difference) as a means to free the subjects from the fixed language and lead them to pursue after satisfying their true nature, awakened from a delusion of language by penetrating into the essence of language. This would be the process of liberating the existence confined by ego and transforming it to the universal ’I'.This study tries to investigate the therapeutic effects of Sasimsagwan meditation upon reducing depression in such manner as suggested by Choi Yeon Ja(2001) as an oriental way of practicing mental health promotion by reducing depression down to the fundamental level. In a test, designed as a quasi-experimental research before and after the time lag of non-synchronized experimental group, Sasimsagwan meditation was conducted only by the experimental group 3 times a week, 6 times in total for 2 weeks during the period from Mar. to July 1999. The subjects of the experiment were 67 students enrolled in the nursing department at W university in I city. Among them. 33 students were grouped for the experimental group, while 34 for the comparison group.In order to examine the variation of depression level in the experimental and control groups, data were collected for finding the differences of reduced depression before and after the experiment by each group and these differences were analyzed by t-test.BDKBeck Depression Inventory), developed by Beck(1978) and arranged by Kim Myung Gwon(1984), was used as a tool to measure the level of depression. The collected data were processed statistically using Minitab.The findings of the research：1. The experimental group conducting Sasimsagwan meditation showed significant decrease of depression compared to the control group which didn't conduct it.

Calling for a truce in the descriptivist-prescriptivist wars

A reply to Tom McArthur, ‘Error, Editing, and World Standard English’, ET65 (Jan 01)When modern linguists focus exclusively on speech, they're overreacting to their predecessors' preoccupation with writing. Descriptivists have a bias toward studying speech; prescriptivists have a bias toward studying writing. Both are important. Speaking precedes writing. It's the essence of language. Yet writing is a form of language worth studying in its own right. For some reason, though, many linguists refuse to recognize this.

On the Borders of Language and Death

On the penultimate page of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Heidegger's essay "Das Wesen der Sprache" ("The Essence of Language"), we find the following brief and enigmatic passage: Die Sterblichen sind jene, die den Tod als Tod erfahren konnen. Das Tier vermag dies nicht. Das Tier kann aber auch nicht sprechen. Das Wesenverhaltnis zwischen Tod and Sprache blitzt auf, ist aber noch ungedacht. Es kann uns jedoch einen Wink geben in die Weise, wie das Wesen der Sprache uns zu sich belangt and so bei sich verhalt, fur den Fall, dass der Tod mit dem zusammenghort, was uns be-langt. [Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern and so relates us to itself, in case death belongs together with what reaches out for us, touches us.]1 The unthought announced here, the "essential relation between language and death," still remains largely unthought today. In his book, Language and Death,2 Giorgio Agamben attempts to begin to think through this relation between language and death, and to explore the implications that a thinking of this unthought might have for a new and different understanding of the ethico-political. Our task in the present essay is not simply to reconstitute the argument of Agamben's text, but to interrogate his thought concerning the essential relation between language and death from the perspective of the question of the animal. Specifically we wish to inquire about the status and the place of the animal in a thought of community that attempts to understand the relation to language and death otherwise. Man's Ethos Beyond Voice and Negativity The introductory section of Language and Death opens with the quotation from Heidegger's On the Way to Language that we have cited above. Agamben isolates one phrase from this quotation by repeating it in italics: "The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought" (LD xi). He then proposes a thematic investigation of this relation between language and death, not only in Heidegger's text, but also in decisive places in the history of western metaphysics, specifically in Hegel, medieval grammatical thought, and modern linguistics. The structure of Agamben's task is fitting since throughout Western metaphysics man's essence has consistently been determined through the possession of one or another distinct abilities or faculties, prominent among them being the capacity for language (e.g., man as noon logon echon in Aristotle) and the capacity for death (e.g., Fahigkeit des Todes in Hegel). Is there any essential connection between these two specific capacities? Anticipating the method and conclusion of Agamben's argument, we can say here at the outset that this question will be investigated through an interrogation of the place of negativity in metaphysical theories of language and death, and that the problem of the Voice will be the clue that leads to the discovery of a common negativity at the core of both of the these capacities. Beginning with an examination of the place of negativity in metaphysics, Agamben looks to Heidegger's discussion of death in paragraphs 50-53 in Sein and Zeit. Here, Heidegger radically reverses the common notion that death is simply an accident that befalls human beings by arguing that death is essential to Dasein's existence. Dasein is not related to death like some chance occurrence that happens to come its way; rather, Heidegger insists, death is Dasein's "ownmost possibility," and as long as Dasein exists it has an essential relation to dying in the form of Being-towards-death. The anticipation of death as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence as such is witnessed or attested to in the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens). …

Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language

Units, rules, codes, systems: this is how most linguists study language. Integrationalists such as Michael Toolan, however, focus instead on how language functions in seamless tandem with the rest of human activity. In Total Speech , Toolan provides a clear and comprehensive account of integrationalism, a major new theory of language that declines to accept that text and context, language and world, are distinct and stable categories. At the same time, Toolan extends the integrationalist argument and calls for a radical change in contemporary theorizing about language and communication. In every foundational area of linguistics—from literal meaning and metaphor to the nature of repetition to the status of linguistic rules—Toolan advances fascinating and provocative criticisms of received linguistic assumptions. Drawing inspiration from the writings of language theorist Roy Harris, Toolan brings the integrationalist perspective to bear on legal cases, the reception of Salman Rushdie, poetry, and the language of children. Toolan demonstrates that the embeddedness of language and the situation-sensitive mutability of meaning reveal language as a tool for re-fashioning and renewal. Total Speech breaks free of standard linguistics’ fascinated attraction with “cognitive blueprints” and quasi-algorithmic processing to characterize language anew. Toolan’s reflections on the essence of language, including his important discussion of intention, have strong implications for students and scholars of discourse analysis, literature, the law, anthropology, philosophy of language, communication theory, and cognitive science, as well as linguistics.

A wild gene chase

MICHAEL BULLEY takes a wry look at the work of those linguists who consider that the essence of language can be found in our DNA.

Antifoundationalism: Old and New (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 533 From Wittgenstein's own pages we get an entirely different impression of what the point of the Tractatu~ was. It was not so much to stick to "immediate experience" as to "complete logic" by finding in the nature of things the absolute simplicity and exactitude which logic as the essence of language seemed to require. Tractatu6 objects are "colorless" (T 2.o232), "fixed and existent" (T 2.o27 l) and make up the possibility of the world (T 2.o14). They may be the coordinates necessary to describe sensibilia in different kinds of "logical space," but they cannot be sensibilia themselves. Objects are the.form and contents of the world (T ~.o25) but the content cannot be expressed or put into words. Cook makes a strenuous attempt to assimilate Wittgenstein to the British empiricist tradition (which he says he himself does not accept), but in the course of doing this he scuttles, or twists out of shape what is most new and valuable in Wittgenstein. He reduces Wittgenstein from a giant to a pygmy. While iconoclasts should always be welcome, when they are engaged in closing off roads to the future of philosophy, however unknowingly, they cannot expect the fullest sympathy. Those who read Wittgenstein as reaching the position that objectivity is given by common agreement in the uses of words and that this is connected not with empiricist metaphysics but with the natural history of human beings will feel that Professor Cook, by keeping on his metaphysical glasses, has missed the main point of this "new way of looking." H. L. FINch Hunter College, CUNY Tom Rockmore and Beth J. Singer, editors. Antifoundationalism: Old and New. Temple University Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 251. Cloth, $44-95. The familiar reviewer's remark about thematic collections, that they contain contributions uneven in both substance and style, applies to this volume designed to show that in different forms and terminology the debate between foundationalists and antifoundationalists is a main current of the entire philosophical tradition, neglected to one's detriment. Precisely because there are importantly distinguishable strands in this debate, Rockmore's introductory effort to characterize the dichotomy generically is unsatisfying. For example, he defines epistemological foundationalism exclusively in terms of the availability of secure or unshakeable grounds for knowledge, and antifoundationalism as "any effort to validate knowledge claims without appealing to an absolute or ultimate basis known with certainty" (8). But this (i) ignores the issue of structural foundationalism--what form a system of justified beliefs must take whether or not any of its components are certainties--so central to contemporary debates; (ii) induces the uncritical supposition that "if the underpinnings of the edifice can be made secure, then nothing can shake the higher stories" (6); and (iii) masks intramural debates about the status of foundations, as when it is falsely supposed that "indefeasible " perceptual statements must be "necessarily true" (7)Joseph Margolis explores the prospects for using Anaximander's notion of the 534 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 JULY 1995 apeiron, which, suitably revised to satisfy various adequacy condititons, amounts to a contextualism, but one not defended within articulatahle language (as with Protagoras ), to challenge all foundationalisms: from the Greek view that whatever is real is unchanging and intelligible only insofar as it possesses invariant structure, to contemporary resistance to conceptual incommensurability (Davidson) and insistence on the invariance of the "subject" or Dasein (Heidegger). Margolis's argument is exegetically speculative (more standardly the apeironis itself an invariant neutral between the four elements though designed to play the role they play in other Milesians) and philosophically provocative. Ronald Polansky argues that neither the argumentative practice in Plato's early dialogues nor the theory of knowledge in the Republic and Theaetetus are strongly foundationalist. Most of what he says seems true but commonplace, and what is controversial is undefended, for example, that a main premise of the Republicis the desire for self-sufficiency (what about division of labor and integration of classes in the polls?), or even that the problem for Plato was one of certainty(for which there is no Greek word) and not just stability. And the most promising locus of foundationalism, Plato's...