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The Origin of Speech
... Lexical borrowings refer to the borrowing of words from one language to another to fill in certain words that do not have a direct translation to the local language. The study is anchored in the phylogenetic change theory made by Hockett (2008) and the deficit hypothesis authored by Kachru (1994). The present study explores the words lexically loaned from the English language in the Chabacano language. ...
... The research objectives sought to identify the lexical category, pattern of borrowing, morphemic structure changes, and the semantic fields of the lexically borrowed words utilized in Chabacano television newscasts. These objectives can be related to the deficit hypothesis of Kachru (1994) and the theory of phylogenetic change of Hockett (2008). Specifically, in our framework, the deficit hypothesis of Kachru (1994) addresses the first research objective. ...
... The categorization of the lexically borrowed English words according to their lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or conjunctions) in Objective 1.1 could provide insights into the areas of lexical deficits within the Chabacano language. The theory of phylogenetic change by Hockett (2008) is able to address the remaining research objectives. Objectives 2 through 4 are relevant to this theory as these objectives aimed to analyze the patterns, morphemic structure changes, and semantic fields of the borrowed English words in Chabacano. ...
... What may have made the segmental phonology dif fer ent from prosody is what is known as duality of patterning (Hockett 1960), which is the essence of phonology as a bottleneck that, as Pierrehumbert notes, "helps the language learner to acquire a large vocabulary by allowing articulatory and perceptual patterns exhibited in one word to be reused in other words" ("Introduction"). Here the key word is the reuse of the same phoneme in dif fer ent words, for example, the vowel /i/ in bin, pin, and tin, and the consonants /b/ and /n/ in bin, ban, and bun. ...
... As recognized by Hockett (1960), duality of patterning is due to heavy crowding in the lexical contrast function, as the number of words that need to be encoded massively exceeds the number of pos si ble distinct segmental categories. Prosody, in contrast, confronts a dif fer ent kind of crowding, that is, each prosodic dimension, for example, F0, is shared by many functions: lexical, focal, phrasal, topical, sentential, attitudinal, emotional, social-indexical, and so on. ...
An introduction to the the range of current theoretical approaches to the prosody of spoken utterances, with practical applications of those theories.
Prosody is an extremely dynamic field, with a rapid pace of theoretical development and a steady expansion of its influence beyond linguistics into such areas as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, speech technology, and even the medical profession. This book provides a set of concise and accessible introductions to each major theoretical approach to prosody, describing its structure and implementation and its central goals and assumptions as well as its strengths and weaknesses. Most surveys of basic questions in prosody are written from the perspective of a single theoretical framework. This volume offers the only summary of the full range of current theoretical approaches, with practical applications of each theory and critical commentary on selected chapters.
The current abundance of theoretical approaches has sometimes led to apparent conflicts that may stem more from terminological differences, or from differing notions of what theories of prosody are meant to achieve, than from actual conceptual disagreement. This volume confronts this pervasive problem head on, by having each chapter address a common set of questions on phonology, meaning, phonetics, typology, psychological status, and transcription. Commentary is added as counterpoint to some chapters, with responses by the chapter authors, giving a taste of current debate in the field.
Contributors
Amalia Arvaniti, Jonathan Barnes, Mara Breen, Laura C. Dilley, Grzegorz Dogil, Martine Grice, Nina Grønnum, Daniel Hirst, Sun-Ah Jun, Jelena Krivokapić, D. Robert Ladd, Fang Liu, Piet Mertens, Bernd Möbius, Gregor Möhler, Oliver Niebuhr, Francis Nolan, Janet Pierrehumbert, Santitham Prom-on, Antje Schweitzer, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Alice Turk, Yi Xu
... What may have made the segmental phonology dif fer ent from prosody is what is known as duality of patterning (Hockett 1960), which is the essence of phonology as a bottleneck that, as Pierrehumbert notes, "helps the language learner to acquire a large vocabulary by allowing articulatory and perceptual patterns exhibited in one word to be reused in other words" ("Introduction"). Here the key word is the reuse of the same phoneme in dif fer ent words, for example, the vowel /i/ in bin, pin, and tin, and the consonants /b/ and /n/ in bin, ban, and bun. ...
... As recognized by Hockett (1960), duality of patterning is due to heavy crowding in the lexical contrast function, as the number of words that need to be encoded massively exceeds the number of pos si ble distinct segmental categories. Prosody, in contrast, confronts a dif fer ent kind of crowding, that is, each prosodic dimension, for example, F0, is shared by many functions: lexical, focal, phrasal, topical, sentential, attitudinal, emotional, social-indexical, and so on. ...
An introduction to the the range of current theoretical approaches to the prosody of spoken utterances, with practical applications of those theories.
Prosody is an extremely dynamic field, with a rapid pace of theoretical development and a steady expansion of its influence beyond linguistics into such areas as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, speech technology, and even the medical profession. This book provides a set of concise and accessible introductions to each major theoretical approach to prosody, describing its structure and implementation and its central goals and assumptions as well as its strengths and weaknesses. Most surveys of basic questions in prosody are written from the perspective of a single theoretical framework. This volume offers the only summary of the full range of current theoretical approaches, with practical applications of each theory and critical commentary on selected chapters.
The current abundance of theoretical approaches has sometimes led to apparent conflicts that may stem more from terminological differences, or from differing notions of what theories of prosody are meant to achieve, than from actual conceptual disagreement. This volume confronts this pervasive problem head on, by having each chapter address a common set of questions on phonology, meaning, phonetics, typology, psychological status, and transcription. Commentary is added as counterpoint to some chapters, with responses by the chapter authors, giving a taste of current debate in the field.
Contributors
Amalia Arvaniti, Jonathan Barnes, Mara Breen, Laura C. Dilley, Grzegorz Dogil, Martine Grice, Nina Grønnum, Daniel Hirst, Sun-Ah Jun, Jelena Krivokapić, D. Robert Ladd, Fang Liu, Piet Mertens, Bernd Möbius, Gregor Möhler, Oliver Niebuhr, Francis Nolan, Janet Pierrehumbert, Santitham Prom-on, Antje Schweitzer, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Alice Turk, Yi Xu
... Categorical Perception (CP) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature (Eimas et al., 1971;Goldstone and Hendrickson, 2010). Discreteness is a prominent feature of human language (Hockett, 1960). In this paper, we propose that CP could have played a foundational role for discreteness of language in evolution. ...
... Discreteness is an essential concept in quantum physics, chemistry, mathematics, and human cognition (Abler, 1989). Discrete and compositional language differs from continuous and holistic non-human animal communication signals, which is one of the design features of human language (Hockett, 1960), in the sense that phonemes of a language are contrastive. For example, in English, "pin" and "bin" differ only on the voice onset time of the initial plosives of the words that changing the onset of a syllable alters the meaning of the words. ...
Categorical Perception (CP) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature (Eimas et al., 1971; Goldstone and Hendrickson, 2010). Discreteness is a prominent feature of human language (Hockett, 1960). In this paper, we propose that CP could have played a foundational role for discreteness of language in evolution. We firstly approach discreteness from a domain general perspective and highlight how it is salient in language. Then by reviewing CP of sounds in non-human animals, we argue that CP has its phylogenetic roots in terms of evolution. Following this, we explain how CP could have been the basis for discreteness with neurological evidence focusing on the auditory cortex, (pre)motor cortex and the basal ganglia. At last, we suggest that clinical linguistics provides revealing insights on the role of CP in language. The current work discusses the role of perception in language evolution, which provides a new avenue to explore the evolution of human language from the sensory-motor system.
... The evolution of communication, wherein privately acquired information is transmitted in a social context, still represents a major issue in evolutionary biology [1,2,3]. In particular, the origin of displaced communication [4,5], where individuals communicate on remote or nonvisible objects or organisms, is poorly understood. Displaced communication is very common in humans [5] and relatively rare in other organisms. ...
... In particular, the origin of displaced communication [4,5], where individuals communicate on remote or nonvisible objects or organisms, is poorly understood. Displaced communication is very common in humans [5] and relatively rare in other organisms. It has also been documented in a few species such as chimpanzees [6,7], dolphins [8] and parrots [9]. ...
Displaced communication, whereby individuals communicate regarding a subject that is not immediately present (spatially or temporally), is one of the key features of human language. It also occurs in a few animal species, most notably the honeybee, where the waggle dance is used to communicate the location and quality of a patch of flowers. However, it is difficult to study how it emerged given the paucity of species displaying this capacity and the fact that it often occurs via complex multimodal signals. To address this issue, we developed a novel paradigm in which we conducted experimental evolution with foraging agents endowed with neural networks that regulate their movement and the production of signals. Displaced communication readily evolved but, surprisingly, agents did not use signal amplitude to convey information on food location. Instead, they used signal onset-delay and duration-based mode of communication, which depends on the motion of the agent within a communication area. When agents were experimentally prevented from using these modes of communication, they evolved to use signal amplitude instead. Interestingly, this mode of communication was more efficient and led to higher performance. Subsequent controlled experiments suggested that this more efficient mode of communication failed to evolve because it took more generations to emerge than communication grounded on the onset-delay and length of signaling. These results reveal that displaced communication is likely to initially evolve from non-communicative behavioral cues providing incidental information with evolution later leading to more efficient communication systems through a ritualization process.
... That the intensifier is a reduplicant and can be multiply repeated is consistent with non-arbitrary soundmeaning mapping across languages (Dingemanse 2015;Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2017), challenging the longstanding view that sound-meaning mapping is completely arbitrary (Hockett 1960;de Saussure 1974). By observing the parallel between arbitrary and non-arbitrary sound-meaning mapping, recent studies argue for the integration of non-arbitrary sound-meaning mapping into core grammar (Yip 1999;Alderete & Kochetov 2017;Kawahara 2020;Akinbo 2021a). ...
... Due to the longstanding view that the relations between sound and meaning are completely arbitrary (Hockett 1960;de Saussure 1974), the non-arbitrary link between form and meaning is seldom integrated with core grammar. Challenging the longstanding view, recent studies have shown that there is a parallel between arbitrary and non-arbitrary sound-meaning association. ...
A pattern of reduplication marks the intensity of evaluatives in Fungwa. CV syllables of nominal roots and CV prefixes can be reduplicated, but V syllables cannot. The intensity marker, which also has a CV shape due to an onset condition, can be multiply repeated. The reduplicative intensifier and its repetition(s) are akin to arbitrary affixes in the language in terms of their phonological characteristics, and they are also consistent with non-arbitrary sound-meaning mapping across languages. Formally, the repetition and shape of the reduplicant are considered to be effects of morphosyntax and markedness constraints. Considering that the evaluative marker and the intensifier are consistent with patterns of sound symbolism, Fungwa presents categorical evidence for the perspective that sound-meaning mapping involves both arbitrariness and non-arbitratriness.
... A related issue is the extent to which we consider the arbitrariness between form and meaning to be a central "design feature" of human language (Hockett, 1960). For a long time, many language researchers assumed, based on their focus on Indo-European spoken languages, that the link between word forms and their meanings was fully or to a large extent arbitrary (following de Saussure, 1916de Saussure, , 1998. ...
... The arbitrary relationship between form and meaning is one of the essential characteristics of language (Hockett, 1960). Language is said to be arbitrary as there is usually no special reason why a specific form (sound or shape) is used to express a certain meaning. ...
Introduction
Sound symbolism is the phenomenon of sounds having non-arbitrary meaning, and it has been demonstrated that pseudowords with sound symbolic elements have similar meaning to lexical words. It is unclear how the impression given by the sound symbolic elements is semantically processed, in contrast to lexical words with definite meanings. In event-related potential (ERP) studies, phonological mapping negativity (PMN) and N400 are often used as measures of phonological and semantic processing, respectively. Therefore, in this study, we analyze PMN and N400 to clarify the differences between existing sound symbolic words (onomatopoeia or ideophones) and pseudowords in terms of semantic and phonological processing.
Methods
An existing sound symbolic word and pseudowords were presented as an auditory stimulus in combination with a picture of an event, and PMN and N400 were measured while the subjects determined whether the sound stimuli and pictures match or mismatch.
Results
In both the existing word and pseudoword tasks, the amplitude of PMN and N400 increased when the picture of an event and the speech sound did not match. Additionally, compared to the existing words, the pseudowords elicited a greater amplitude for PMN and N400. In addition, PMN latency was delayed in the mismatch condition relative to the match condition for both existing sound symbolic words and pseudowords.
Discussion
We concluded that established sound symbolic words and sound symbolic pseudowords undergo similar semantic processing. This finding suggests that sound symbolism pseudowords are not judged on a simple impression level (e.g., spiky/round) or activated by other words with similar spellings (phonological structures) in the lexicon, but are judged on a similar contextual basis as actual words.
... Criteria (1-3) have to do with the materiality (i.e., the manner of producing and perceiving) of the signs, while (4-6) with their semiotic potential (i.e., the nature of how meaning-production is organized): 1. Production: the way the physical carrier of the sign, e.g., sound waves, marks on a surface, bodily movements, etc., is made. 2. Modality: the (predominant) sensory modality used to perceive the media in question, e.g., vision for pictures, hearing for speech and music, etc. 3. Degree of permanence: constraints on the duration of perception and interpreting of the signs in question, i.e., the reverse of what is sometimes called "fading," with so-called rapid fading being a "design feature" of speech (Hockett 1960), but not (relatively speaking, even if the medium is as impermanent as sand) of writing. 4. Double articulation (or "duality of patterning"): some, but not all, signs can be constructed through systematic combinations of elements that are meaningless in themselves, e.g., phonemes in spoken languages (Jakobson 1965), or "cheremes" in (some, see below) signed languages (Tamura and Kawasaki 1988). ...
Human communication is by default polysemiotic: it involves the spontaneous combination of two or more semiotic systems, the most important ones being language, gesture, and depiction. We formulate an original cognitive-semiotic framework for the analysis of polysemiosis, contrasting this with more familiar systems based on the ambiguous term “multimodality.” To be fully explicit, we developed a coding system for the analysis of polysemiotic utterances containing speech, gesture, and drawing, and implemented this in the ELAN video annotation software. We used this to analyze 23 video-recordings of sand drawing performances on Paama, Vanuatu and 20 sand stories of the Pitjantjatjara culture in Central Australia. Methodologically we used the conceptual-empirical loop of cognitive semiotics: our theoretical framework guided general considerations, such as distinguishing between the “tiers” of gesture and depiction, and the three kinds of semiotic grounds (iconic, indexical, symbolic), but the precise decisions on how to operationalize these were made only after extensive work with the material. We describe the coding system in detail and provide illustrative examples from the Paamese and Pitjantjatjara data, remarking on both similarities and differences in the polysemiosis of the two cultural practices. We conclude by summarizing the contributions of the study and point to some directions for future research.
... Recently, there has been renewed interest in the role of iconicity in human communication (Fay, Ellison, & Garrod, 2014;Perlman, Dale, & Lupyan, 2015). Although arbitrariness has historically been considered a central design feature of language (Hockett, 1960), sound symbolism appears more prevalent than first acknowledged (Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015;Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). Similarly, new studies on the possible evolutionary roots of language (whether spoken, signed, or written) suggest a stage of iconically grounded reference in, for instance, pantomime, vocalisations, or figurative depiction (Garrod, Fay, Lee, Oberlander, & MacLeod, 2007;Nölle, Staib, Fusaroli, & Tylén, 2028;Perlman & Lupyan, 2018;Zlatev, Żywiczyński, & Wacewicz, 2020). ...
Despite obvious advantages, no generalised ideographic codes have evolved through cultural evolution to rely on iconicity. Morin suggests that this is because of missing means of standardisation, which glottographic codes get from natural languages. Although we agree, we also point to the important role of the available media, which might support some forms of reference more effectively than others.
... According to Hockett (1960), the internal structure has three components: ...
The present study investigated the prosodic features employed by Trevor Noah to create humor in his stand-up comedy. The study used quantitative paradigms to frame the verbal narrative. The research employed, Prosodic Markers of Saliency in Humorous Narratives (Pickering et al., 2009) as theoretical framework for prosodic features. Firstly, the data was anatomized via systematic prosodic and cognitive incongruities between the jokes’ setup and the punch lines. Secondly, for each humorous narrative, a series of measurements including pitch, volume, and pause, as identified by Praat (6.1), were used as a framework to dig out the implicit and explicit factors that caused humor in stand-up acts. The data analysis showed that the orator employed a substantial pause before delivering his punch lines which created humor. The study concluded that prosody played a vital role in creating humor, which falls within the domain of linguistics. The study was significant as it contributed to research concerning narrative forms of jokes based on instrumental prosodic analysis. Further, the research might be conducted to analyze other paralinguistic markers of humor, such as the use of laughter and smile during the delivery of jokes in different Pakistani sitcoms and stand-up comedy, to enlarge the studies on humor’s scope.
... Being highly social animals, primates use flexible acoustic signals to maintain social relationships and calls have been hypothesized to have different functions that impact fitness Lau et al., 2020). Human language was traditionally thought to be unique across primates regarding acoustic variation, as smaller random acoustic elements can be assembled in higher-order phrases to create meaningful ones (Hocket, 1960;Hurford & Hurford, 2012). However, there is increasing evidence that a wide variety of nonhuman primates also exhibit vocal flexibility and can combine acoustic notes in unique orders to create longer meaningful vocal phrases (Rauber et al., 2020;Suzuki et al., 2016). ...
Nonhuman primate vocalizations have been traditionally described as stereotyped and most likely genetically determined. However, there is increasing evidence of flexibility with a wide variety of species demonstrating the ability to change aspects of their calls, such as note order and phrase duration. We assess patterns of variation in note order and temporal features in wild siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus) phrases. We used three types of analyses on 1,015 ululating scream phrases (US-II), containing 21,609 notes, produced by ten siamang groups at three field sites. First, to assess similarity or differences in the organization of notes in the US-II phrase, we calculated the Levenshtein distance (LD), which quantifies the similarity of sequences of strings through the number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one into the other. Second, we used a supervised classification approach to see how well we could assign US-II phrases to their groups and sites. Third, we compared five unsupervised clustering algorithms to investigate the tendency to cluster in US-II phrase types. The note order of the US-II phrase was variable shown by relatively large LD values; there also were significant mean differences between groups. Supervised classification using support vector machine and leave-one-out cross-validation returned 89.5% accuracy for site and 53.1% for group. For unsupervised clustering, the most stable solution based on the Silhouette coefficient returned four unique clusters or classes of the US-II phrase in our dataset. Our findings indicate high levels of intragroup variation in the US-II phrase and are consistent with previous reports on siamang vocalizations being flexible. Quantifying variation in the siamang US-II phrase provides a crucial first step in understanding the evolutionary forces that shaped these signals and the potential information they convey.
... Current embodied agents can follow simple, lowlevel instructions like "get the blue block" [48] or "go past the elevator and turn right" [5]. However, to communicate freely interactive agents should understand the full range of ways people use language beyond the "here and now" [30]: transmitting knowledge such as "the top left button turns off the TV," providing situational information such as "we're out of milk," and coordinating by saying "I already vacuumed the living room." Much of what we read in text or hear from others communicates knowledge about the world, either about how the world works or about the current state of the world. ...
To interact with humans in the world, agents need to understand the diverse types of language that people use, relate them to the visual world, and act based on them. While current agents learn to execute simple language instructions from task rewards, we aim to build agents that leverage diverse language that conveys general knowledge, describes the state of the world, provides interactive feedback, and more. Our key idea is that language helps agents predict the future: what will be observed, how the world will behave, and which situations will be rewarded. This perspective unifies language understanding with future prediction as a powerful self-supervised learning objective. We present Dynalang, an agent that learns a multimodal world model that predicts future text and image representations and learns to act from imagined model rollouts. Unlike traditional agents that use language only to predict actions, Dynalang acquires rich language understanding by using past language also to predict future language, video, and rewards. In addition to learning from online interaction in an environment, Dynalang can be pretrained on datasets of text, video, or both without actions or rewards. From using language hints in grid worlds to navigating photorealistic scans of homes, Dynalang utilizes diverse types of language to improve task performance, including environment descriptions, game rules, and instructions.
... The language evolution research community takes a slightly different perspective on what is meant by "compositionality." In this context, compositionality is taken to be a prerequisite of a generative communication system-a property exhibited by human natural language in contrast to animal signaling systems (Hockett, 1960;Smith & Kirby, 2012). Furthermore, compositionality is often argued to be necessary for the learnability of such a productive communication system (Davidson, 1965;Pagin, 2012). ...
*** This paper has been accepted as a poster with full paper publication to the 2023 Annual Cognitive Society Meeting in Sydney, Australia. Please cite the published version: Rorot, W., & Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. (2023). Understanding "Compositionality" in Research on Language Emergence. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6tg5d31m *** The goal of this paper is to analyze the notion of “compositionality” and its use in contemporary cognitive science. We argue that the concept has undergone a series of apparently minor definitional shifts since its initial inception within the field of philosophy of language (as indicated by Janssen, 2012). These changes result in a divergent meaning of the term as it is used in the emergent communication and language evolution communities. Hitherto, this fact has been underappreciated, whereas we believe that it has significant implications for understanding the nature of syntax and the sources of linguistic and conceptual structure. We argue that originally, “compositionality” was understood as pertaining primarily to the process of understanding a compound utterance by a hearer. Other scholars, however, take it to be a prerequisite of the structure of languages. In all contexts, investigating compositionality of natural languages requires making a host of idealizing assumptions. For this reason, we propose to understand compositionality as just one idealized principle influencing the construction of compound expressions in language, necessarily complemented by other principles. This allows for appreciating the structural entanglements permeating natural language and opens new avenues for accounting for them.
... It is important to note at this point that, as understood here, referential freedom has a slightly different meaning from that of displaced reference (Hockett, 1960), another term that is used to define the differences between the referential capabilities of human and animal communication systems. Displaced reference is defined as the ability to use a sign to refer to something that is spatially or temporally remote from the present location of who uses the sign. ...
From the beginning, an ancient problem for human thought has been to explain the conditions that allowed the development of language, along with the related issue of understanding the essential characteristics that distinguish it from animal communication systems. An article of significant influence was Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002), which proposed that the essential characteristic of human language is its generative capacity, the ability to express and understand meaning using basic elements (such as morphemes and words) to produce new sentences. The article by Hauser and colleagues provoked many reactions, including negative ones, one of which is that of Jackendoff and Pinker (Jackendoff & Pinker, 2005). These authors identify the main characteristic of language not so much in its pure syntactic capacity, but in its being more specifically a "discrete combinatorial system" (Pinker, 1994): in systems of this type, a finite number of discrete elements are chosen, combined, and permuted to create larger structures with properties distinct from those of their components. In contrast to Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002), and also to Jackendoff & Pinker (2005), Pinker and Jackendoff (2005), in this article, I propose that the essential trait of human language, from which all others descend is, instead, what I will call referential freedom, that is, the ability that allows humans to talk about anything, not only of things, actions and events belonging to the present of the act of communication but also of their past and their future, as well as of things belonging to other places and Spatio-temporal realities. In fact, a language characterized by a discrete combinatorial system, or simply by the combinatorial complexity generated by syntactic generative capacity, would be utterly useless if the communicative act were closely linked to the here and now of the present. In particular, I will examine the neuro-cognitive conditions that may have allowed humans to develop referential freedom and, more generally, representational detachment from the present.
... The theoretical demarcation of morphological productivity (Section 2.1) becomes essential before relating it to the origin and habitual analyses of -ment (Section 2.2). Productivity has been portrayed as a language property for centuries (Bauer 2001: 11-32;Schmid 2016: 111-115) and, more explicitly, has been placed at the core of language descriptions since Hockett's (1960) catalogue of features of human communication. Research into morphological productivity has enjoyed a remarkable development especially since Aronoff (1976) and the pioneering theoretical propositions therein. ...
Morphological productivity represents an essential property for human language and, as such, it lies at the core of any thorough word-formation theory. Studies in productivity have traditionally focused on areas of high profitability, that is, on the quantification and ranking of processes which show the capacity for lexical creation (e.g. -able, -ness, -ity). In other cases, however, morphological processes can no longer be used productively, or they can be used minimally (e.g. -th, -hood). These processes have received considerably less attention in the literature, partly due to their complex theoretical definition, partly due to their difficult practical assessment. In view of the shortage of specific research, this paper revolves around the current status of the nominalizing suffix -ment, which enjoyed a high profitability index between the 12th and 17th centuries, and is today taken to embody marginal productivity in synchronic terms. The suffix is explored in the light of lexicographic and corpus data for an inspection of its role in nominalizations with the meaning ACTION/PROCESS, specifically concerning recent coinages that suggest some degree of morphological activity. This up-to-date picture of -ment shows that it is risky to present it as unproductive, and it leads to the consideration of related notions like the availability-unavailability divide or the measurement of low productivity .
... When P and Q are embedded under a conditional connective, however, the two relevant events are no longer factual, which, according to Russell (1903Russell ( /2010, the two propositions embedded under a conditional connective are merely considered, but not asserted, means that no truthvalues are assigned to the two propositions. That is to say, a conditional in human language can refer to events beyond here and now (Hockett, 1960). If two people are arguing If P then Q and are both in doubt about P, then they are adding P hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and are arguing on that basis about Q (Ramsey, 1929). ...
A conditional statement If P then Q is formed by combining the two propositions P and Q together with the conditional connective If ··· then ···. When embedded under the conditional connective, the two propositions P and Q describe hypothetical events that are not actualized. It remains unclear when such hypothetical thinking is activated in the real-time comprehension of conditional statements. To tackle this problem, we conducted an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm. Participants' eye movements on the concurrent image were recorded when they were listening to the auditorily presented conditional statements. Depending on when and what critical information is added into the auditory input, there are four possible temporal slots to observe in the online processing of the conditional statement: the sentential connective If, the antecedent P, the consequent Q, and the processing of the sentence following the conditional. We mainly focused on the first three slots. First, the occurrence of the conditional connective should trigger participants to search in the visual world for the event that could not assign a truth-value to the embedded proposition. Second, if the embedded proposition P can be determined as true by an event, the hypothetical property implied by the connective would prevent the participants from excluding the consideration of other events. The consideration of other events would yield more fixations on the events where the proposition is false.
... Recursion is-to the best of our knowledge-one of the few properties entirely unique to human language (Hockett, 1960). Despite previous claims to the contrary (Fitch and Hauser, 2004;Gentner et al., 2006), no other animal communication system has been convincingly shown to feature recursion (Beecher, 2021;Corballis, 2007). ...
Recursion is one of the hallmarks of human language. While many design features of language have been shown to exist in animal communication systems, recursion has not. Previous research shows that GPT-4 is the first large language model (LLM) to exhibit metalinguistic abilities (Beguš, Dąbkowski, and Rhodes, 2023). Here, we propose several prompt designs aimed at eliciting and analyzing recursive behavior in LLMs, both linguistic and non-linguistic. We demonstrate that when explicitly prompted, GPT-4 can both produce and analyze recursive structures. Thus, we present one of the first studies investigating whether metalinguistic awareness of recursion—a uniquely human cognitive property—can emerge in transformers with a high number of parameters such as GPT-4.
... However, such effects are not unprecedented in natural language: ABSL is a well-known example of a language that apparently lacked combinatorial phonologyby which is meant meaningless units reused between signs-for a surprisingly long time (Sandler et al., 2011). It has long been argued that phonology likely emerges as the set of signs increases in size, leaving less space for distinct signs in the absence of recombination (e.g., Hockett, 1960). However, several experimental studies have failed to find strong evidence that the number of signs plays a very important role, with evidence instead that capacity for iconicity . ...
Introduction:
Why is it that phonologies exhibit greater dispersion than we might expect by chance? In earlier work we investigated this using a non-linguistic communication game in which pairs of participants sent each other series of colors to communicate a set of animal silhouettes. They found that above-chance levels of dispersion, similar to that seen in vowel systems, emerged as a result of the production and perception demands acting on the participants. However, they did not investigate the process by which this dispersion came about.
Method:
To investigate this we conducted a secondary statistical analysis of the data, looking in particular at how participants approached the communication task, how dispersion emerged, and what convergence looked like.
Results:
We found that dispersion was not planned from the start but emerged as a large-scale consequence of smaller-scale choices and adjustments. In particular, participants learned to reproduce colors more reliably over time, paid attention to signaling success, and shifted towards more extreme areas of the space over time.
Conclusion:
This study sheds light on the role of interactive processes in mediating between human minds and the emergence or larger-scale structure, as well as the distribution of features across the world's languages.
... It involves the precise coordination of the articulators such as the jaw, lips, tongue, teeth and vocal apparatus including the vocal cords, vocal tract and respiration. Humans are the only species on the planet that can communicate by producing speech (Hockett, 1960). Humans use speech to express thoughts, feelings and ideas to each other. ...
Although voice and speech are fundamental communication tools, spoken-voice management and development doesn't always feature prominently in professional interpreter training programs. My thesis is dedicated to the effects of spoken-voice intervention on interpreting students’ vocal performance during interpreting. A mixed-method study design was applied, with both quantitative and qualitative data reflecting the learners’ performances in consecutive interpreting. The students’ interpreting was recorded at two specific moments during their training, and three external assessors – a voice coach, an interpreting instructor and a lay assessor – evaluated their performances. Based on the conclusions, the spoken-voice intervention approach yielded a highly positive intervention outcome, resulting in significant levels of improvement in vocal performance in relation to the delivery of interpreting delivery for the three intervention groups. However, the level of improvement varied due to the different intervention activities, regimens, and instruction approaches. This study recommends incorporating metacognitive instruction into interpreter training. It is not only beneficial for students’ speaking-voice skills but may also enhance students’ interpreting skills.
... This communication system is also useful for thinking because it is an excellent way to mentally represent the world [1][2][3][4] . Traditionally, language alone was given full credit for this impressive expressive power and cognitive benefit 2,5,6 . However, human communication is inherently 'multimodal' [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] , comprising multiple modes of representation, most notably language and gesture. ...
... This paper explores how Yorùbá gamers map lexical meaning to videogame music in their native language. Soundmeaning mapping is an obligatory aspect of spoken language (Hockett, 1960;de Saussure, 1974;Dingemanse et al., 2015) but an optional aspect of music. For example, it has been repeatedly shown that humans associate affective and non-affective meaning to various pitch and tempo patterns (Feld, 1984;Hacohen and Wagner, 1997;Koelsch et al., 2004;Patel, 2008;García et al., 2014;Neumeyer, 2015). ...
An aspect of gaming culture among Yorùbá millennials is verbally interpreting certain musical motifs of the popular videogame called Super Mario Bros. The themes of the verbal interpretations are comparable to those of music texts at traditional Yorùbá competitions. Drawing on the Yorùbá music tradition, the account in this work is that, to the gamers, the background music of the videogame performs a similar function as the music at traditional Yorùbá competitions. Semantically, the choice of words in the linguistic interpretation is conditioned by the situational contexts or scenes where the music is heard in the video-game. The results of an acoustic analysis show that the pitch contours of the linguistic interpretations resemble the pitch trajectories of the corresponding music motifs. Thus, the sequence of words in each linguistic interpretation is determined by vocal imitation. This study suggests that the linguistic processing of music does not only involve phonetic iconicity but includes contextual inference and social expectation. The interpretive moves clearly point to strong parallels between sound-meaning mapping in spoken language and music.
... A pesar de todo, todavía queda mucho por hacer en todo este proceso. Si tenemos en cuenta a C. Hockett (1960) y W. H. Thorpe (1974), podemos ver que el lenguaje natural humano tiene unas características específicas, según las cuales nos diferencia de cualquier otro sistema vivo o máquina. De este modo, el lenguaje humano tiene una capacidad reflexiva que le permite desarrollar una función metalingüística de la lengua, es decir, de poder reflexionar sobre diferentes aspectos, incluido el propio lenguaje natural. ...
... It is worth remembering that the earliest hominids, who had high levels of reactive aggression, practiced musilanguage rather than "language" and must have cultivated signals similar to animal communication. The latter simply could not support the "duality of patterning" (Hockett, 1960) and combinatoriality. Therefore, the "linguistic" component in musilanguage is harder to see than the "musical" component, although there is evidence that animal communication uses referential as well as motivational information, each coded differently (Manser, 2010). ...
Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression.
... Starting from philosophers like Aristotle, and over many centuries, scholars from different disciplines were dominated by a vision of language as an essentially acoustic-vocal skill. Hockett (1960) proposed his list of 13 features that had to be present in any human language, among which the vocal auditory channel, arbitrariness, and discreteness had relevant roles. However, in the same year, Stokoe published his linguistic analysis that showed that American Sign Language (ASL) has structural properties that are comparable to those of vocal languages (i.e., a highly abstract, rule governed, combinatorial linguistic system), and thus must be recognized as a fully developed natural human language (Stokoe, 1960). ...
A consolidated tendency considers ‘gestures’ and ‘signs’ as distinct categories separated by a ‘cataclysmic break’. According to a different approach, gestures and signs have their common origin in actions, and are considered as part of language. The aim of this study was to compare the productions of preschool speaking hearing children and signing deaf children in response to the same visual stimuli. The execution parameters and representational strategies observed in gestures and signs were analyzed using the same coding. The results showed that hearing children exposed to Italian and deaf children exposed to Italian Sign Language are consistent in their productions of gestures and signs, respectively. Furthermore, the hearing children’s gestures and the deaf children’s signs for some items were produced with the same parameters and according to similar representational strategies. This indicates that these two forms of communication are not separate behaviors, but should rather be considered as a continuum.
... The printed book, being an object made of letters, had a label in letters: the title page. 3 See in this regard the famous article by Hockett [8], but also more recent ones [9] and [10]. 4 Even Dor agrees that the displacement ability seems to be decidedly lacking in the vocal signaling of primates, the closest biological relatives of humans, although it does occur in the dance of bees which grounds the hypothetical exceptions about bees that we noted earlier [11]. ...
The following contribution was presented during the event, “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: the Engagement of Abrahamic Religions in the Rome Call.” The event was sponsored by the Vatican RenAIssance Foundation, the Abu Dhabi (UAE) Forum for Peace and the Commission for Interreligious Dialogue of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. The Rome Call for AI Ethics ( www.romecall.org ), finalized in February 2020 and also signed at the time by some of the world’s largest tech companies (Microsoft and IBM), along with the FAO and representatives of the Italian government, commits signatories to follow what its principles call for in terms of transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, security and privacy. Religions have played and will continue to play a crucial role in shaping a world in which human beings are at the center of the concept of development. For this reason, an ethical development of artificial intelligence must be approached from an interfaith perspective. The potential of an interfaith event lies in the impact this message communicates. In the face of the radical transformations that digital and intelligent technologies are producing in society, the three Abrahamic religions together provide guidance for humanity’s search for meaning in this new era.
Iconicity between form and meaning of words is considered to be instrumental in relating linguistic forms to sensorimotor experience. Some Russian onomatopoeic words (e.g. bac ‘bang’) depict sounds and indicate action connected to these sounds. This study investigated how sensitive adult Finnish L1 speakers with no prior knowledge of Russian are to the iconicity of spoken onomatopoeic words in Russian. First, an iconicity rating test was used to establish the iconicity levels for each token from the perspective of Finnish native speakers who had never learned Russian before. Second, an eye-tracking experiment using different participants, who were also native in Finnish and unfamiliar with Russian, employed the visual world paradigm to test visual recognition of the meaning of spoken words. Our results revealed that iconicity rating for each token varied within the class of onomatopoeic words, and that iconicity ratings for different words were strongly connected with their semantic transparency.
Human language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. Scholars have long sought to characterize its uniqueness, but each time a property is proposed to set human language apart (e.g., reference, syntax), some (attenuated) version of that property is found in animals. Recently, the uniqueness argument has shifted from linguistic rules to cognitive capacities underlying them. Scholars argue that human language is unique because it relies on ostension and inference, while animal communication depends on simple associations and largely hardwired signals. Such characterizations are often borne out in published data, but these empirical findings are driven by radical differences in the ways animal and human communication are studied. The field of animal communication has been dramatically shaped by the “code model,” which imagines communication as involving information packets that are encoded, transmitted, decoded, and interpreted. This framework standardized methods for studying meaning in animal signals, but it does not allow for the nuance, ambiguity, or contextual variation seen in humans. The code model is insidious. It is rarely referenced directly, but it significantly shapes how we study animals. To compare animal communication and human language, we must acknowledge biases resulting from the different theoretical models used. By incorporating new approaches that break away from searching for codes, we may find that animal communication and human language are characterized by differences of degree rather than kind.
Following the first descriptions of culture in primates, widespread agreement has developed that the term can be applied to nonhumans as group‐specific, socially learned behaviors. While behaviors such as those involving extractive tool use have been researched intensively, we propose that behaviors that are more subtle, less likely to be ecologically constrained, and more likely to be socially shaped, such as cultural forms of communication, provide compelling evidence of culture in nonhuman primates. Additionally, cultural forms of communication can provide novel insights into animal cognition such as the capacity for conformity, conventionalized meanings, arbitrariness in signal forms, and even symbolism. In this paper we focus on evidence from studies conducted on wild great apes. First, we provide a thorough review of what exactly we do know, and by extension don't know, about great ape cultural communication. We argue that detailed research on both vocal and gestural communication in wild great apes shows a more nuanced and variable repertoire than once assumed, with increasing support for group‐specific variation. Second, we discuss the relevance of great ape cultural communication and its potential for illustrating evolutionary continuity for human‐like cultural attributes, namely cumulative culture and symbolism. In sum, a concerted effort to examine cultural forms of communication in great apes could reveal novel evidence for cultural capacities that have thus far been heavily debated in the literature and can simultaneously contribute to an improved understanding of the complex minds of our closest living relatives.
Writing systems display ubiquitous linguistic structure, from the recursive syntactic properties of their glyphs to the morphology/phonology of their combinatorics. This extends to Ancient Egyptian, Chinese, and Sumerian ideograms. Pure ideography requires switching this influence off. The pervasive linguistic tinge to the fabric of writing systems suggests that the chances of breaking what Morin terms language's lock-in effect are slim.
Have you ever wondered whether we are alone in the universe, or if life forms on other planets might exist? If they do exist, how might their languages have evolved? Could we ever understand them, and indeed learn to communicate with them? This highly original, thought-provoking book takes us on a fascinating journey over billions of years, from the formation of galaxies and solar systems, to the appearance of planets in the habitable zones of their parent stars, and then to how biology and, ultimately, human life arose on our own planet. It delves into how our brains and our language developed, in order to explore the likelihood of communication beyond Earth and whether it would evolve along similar lines. In the process, fascinating insights from the fields of astronomy, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neuroscience and linguistics are uncovered, shedding new light on life as we know it on Earth, and beyond.
Have you ever wondered whether we are alone in the universe, or if life forms on other planets might exist? If they do exist, how might their languages have evolved? Could we ever understand them, and indeed learn to communicate with them? This highly original, thought-provoking book takes us on a fascinating journey over billions of years, from the formation of galaxies and solar systems, to the appearance of planets in the habitable zones of their parent stars, and then to how biology and, ultimately, human life arose on our own planet. It delves into how our brains and our language developed, in order to explore the likelihood of communication beyond Earth and whether it would evolve along similar lines. In the process, fascinating insights from the fields of astronomy, evolutionary biology, palaeoanthropology, neuroscience and linguistics are uncovered, shedding new light on life as we know it on Earth, and beyond.
Languages have undergone a wide variety of evaluations, which have triggered many value-judgements about their worth, i.e. about the better or worse nature of some languages as opposed to others. Currently, this situation still persists, in such a way that the thesis of linguistic egalitarianism is being challenged by several proposals. This paper critically discusses the task of evaluating languages, and it argues that any scientific attempt to rate languages from a linguistic approach should fulfill the basic condition of bringing objective criteria to the fore. However, the paper contends that this condition is not met, and it analyzes four different problems language evaluation is endowed with. The problems convert the proposals of rating languages according to their different worth into arbitrary and decontextualized. We conclude that to construct language rankings (through very different parameters) based on the different worth of languages adds nothing to the scientific knowledge of languages, and, in most cases, it expresses or promotes linguistic prejudice.
A fundamental capacity of language is its reflexivity. But not every aspect of language is equally accessible to being reflected upon. Michael Silverstein's 1981 paper, the "Limits of Awareness," set the terms of this discussion in linguistic anthropology with his study of speakers' "awareness" of pragmatic forms and their corresponding capacity to talk about them. His notion of differential "awareness" of aspects of language has since been foundational to linguistic-anthropological understandings of language ideologies. Here we consider Silverstein's argument with reference to our research in Laos, exploring the limits of metalinguistic discourse. We argue that the apparent constraints on our capacity to talk about aspects of language do not evidence limits of awareness of elements of language, but rather constraints on our ability to thematize those elements, that is, to bring them into joint attention. The central issue is the-matization, and the relation of interest is a relation of joint attention between speakers. Metalanguage is thus constrained not (only) by psychological limits but by the social and semiotic limits on what people can bring into mutual focus within interactions. To present our framing of the issue and show what it helps us see, we distinguish two kinds of thematization and describe their subtypes, affordances, and constraints. We then demonstrate how social conventions--broadly understood--can circumvent these constraints, allowing people to thematize otherwise difficult to thematize forms.
Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects of the same semantic category (e.g., both are animals), that is, to what extent children assume meaning overlap given form overlap between two words. We tested this by first presenting children (N = 93, Mage = 22.4 months) with novel word-object associations. Then, we examined the extent to which children assume that a similar sounding novel label, that is, a phonological neighbour, refers to a similar looking object, that is, a likely semantic neighbour, as opposed to a dissimilar looking object. Were children to preferentially fixate the similar-looking novel object, it would suggest that systematic word form-meaning relations aid referent selection in young children. While we did not find any evidence for such word form-meaning systematicity, we demonstrated that children showed robust learning for the trained novel word-object associations, and were able to discriminate between similar-sounding labels and also similar-looking objects. Thus, we argue that unlike iconicity which appears early in vocabulary development, we find no evidence for systematicity in early referent selection.
Glossolalia is a vocal phenomenon in which meaning emerges from the reiteration of the aural and prosodic aspects of language, regardless of the semanticity and the relation between signifier and signified that establishes the linguistic sign. Although widely associated with Christianity, glossolalia can be thought of more broadly as a mantic discourse, that is, as a verbal speech inspired by linguistic alterities, often nonhuman ones. Unlike most common perceptions, glossolalia is not composed of random vocalizations, but presents a phonological and rhythmic structure that allows it to be described and compared with other linguistic forms. In terms of semiosis, the glosses use the iconicity of the speech sounds to refer to the cosmological references of the community of speakers, especially with regard to the ritual value of the ineffable word.
Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.
Human language is a remarkable and complex system of communication that distinguishes us from other species on the planet. It serves as a tool for expressing our thoughts, sharing information, and creating social bonds. The study of language and its nature has fascinated linguists, philosophers, and researchers for centuries, leading to various theoretical frameworks and perspectives. One such perspective is the semiotic view, which explores language as a semiotic system of signs and symbols. The semiotic approach to understanding language emphasizes the relationship between signs, meanings, and their interpretation. Developed by scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce, semiotics provides a framework to analyze human language's structure, function, and characteristics. In this context, this paper aims to explore the nature of human language and its key characteristics from a semiotic perspective using a real-life scenario where we explain how a message is conveyed through signals and channels. Additionally, we examine the nature of human language, referring to the definition Bloch and Trager gave in 1942. Finally, we conclude by asserting that all human languages are equally important and necessary, with no one language being superior in structure, history, or biology.
South America extends, north to south, from Punta Gallinas in Colombia to the Drake Passage in Cape Horn and, east to west, from Cabo Branco in Brazil (Ponta do Seixas) to Punta Pariñas in Peru, being the fourth largest world’s continent in territory and 50th in population. It is one of our last storehouses of natural resources, including fauna, flora, mineral, and hydric reserves. However, for centuries, South America’s natural reserves have been increasingly depleted without much concern and planning. The present book is devoted to another, even less minded, often ignored, treasure of South America: linguistic diversity. Although some of us, linguists, defend that language is part of our genetic endowment, while others take it to be a cultural asset, we all agree that languages are a humankind patrimony, and linguistic preservation, documentation, and analysis are priorities, especially when minority languages are considered. Thus, studies on languages of South America are first concern.
Evolution is a hard problem, and language evolution even more so. There is no easy algorithmic answer to the problem of how language evolved and developed to its present state in the human species. In the absence of direct archeological evidence for language in earlier forms, the subject matter of language evolution becomes an almost intractable problem.
The last three decades have brought a wealth of new empirical data and methods that have transformed investigations of language evolution into a fast-growing field of scientific research. In this paper, we investigate how the results of this research are represented in the content of the most popular introductory linguistic textbooks. We carried out a comprehensive computer-assisted qualitative study, in which we inspected eighteen English-language textbooks for all content related to the evolutionary emergence of language and its uniqueness in nature, in order to evaluate its thematic scope, selection of topics, theories covered, researchers cited, structural soundness, currency, and factual accuracy. Overall, we found that the content of interest lacks a defined canonical representation across the textbooks. The coverage of animal communication was relatively broad, with some recurring classic examples, such as vervet monkeys or honeybees; this content was mostly structured around the ‘design features’ approach. In contrast, the coverage of topics related to language origins and evolution was much less extensive and systematic, and tended to include a relatively large the proportion of content of historical value (i.e. creation myths, ‘bow-wow’ theories). We conclude by making recommendations for future editions of textbooks, in particular, a better representation of important frameworks such as signalling theory, and of current research results in this fast-paced field.
A classic example of the arbitrary relation between the way a word sounds and its meaning is that microorganism is a very long word that refers to a very small entity, whereas whale is a very short word that refers to something very big. This example, originally presented in Hockett's list of language's design features, has been often cited over the years, not only by those discussing the arbitrary nature of language, but also by researchers of sound symbolism. While the two groups disagreed regarding the role of arbitrariness and sound symbolism in language, they both agreed there is a nonsound symbolic relation between word length and entity size in this case. This paper shows that the length of the words whale and microorganism in fact reflects a sound symbolic pattern. An analysis of >600 languages from >100 language families shows that languages use longer words to denote the concept small than they do to denote the concept big. The paper thus shows how explicit judgments might differ from implicit cognitive association and the problem of relying on these in sound symbolism research.
The paper attempts to provide an answer to the question of the semantic compulsion exerted by language on its speakers. It does so via an analysis of Husserl’s extended meaning chain and his comments in his Nachlass on language as Zumutung (imposition). The central thrust of the paper is the question of how the linguistic linkage compulsion (LLC) affects the components of Husserl’s language meaning paradigm, consisting of Bedeutungsintention (meaning intention), the minimal sense of Bedeutung, and Sinn as saturating meaning fulfilment. As to its methodological commitment, the paper employs a Husserlian description of the intentional acts of active and passive syntheses which we cannot but perform when we engage in natural language as communication. The paper concludes with a review of its findings from the perspective of Husserl’s key concept of intentionality.
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