Language, Logic, and the Brain

Language is primarily a physical, and more particularly a biological phenomenon. To say that it is primarily so is to say that that is how, in the first instance, it presents itself to observation. It is curious then that theoreticians of language treat it as though it were primarily semantic or syntactic or some fusion of the two, and as though our implicit understanding of semantics and the syntax regulates both our language production and our language comprehension. On this view the brain is both a repository of semantic and syntactic constraints, and is the instrument by which we draw upon these accounts for the hard currency of linguistic exchange. With this view comes a division of the vocables of language into those that carry semantic content (lexical vocabulary) and those that mark syntactic form (functional and logical vocabulary). Logical theory of the past 150 years understood by many as a purified abstraction of linguistic forms. So it is not surprising that the “logica...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJCINI
• Authors: Ray E. Jennings
• Keywords: IJCINI 2007, Lexical Vocabulary, Logical Vocabulary, Semantic