On the Cognition of the Expression of Thought in Language

概要

Understanding the process of the expression of thought in language is of central
importance to our understanding of language, thought, and cognition. This issue relates
to the function of language as a system, cognitive processes, and how they interact. The
basic question to be answered is: What are the cognitive processes involved in creating
a linguistic expression from thought and how do they achieve it?
Since thought is not limited by language, the general case we must deal with is the
derivation of linguistic expressions from language-independent thought. That is: the
original thought is not in the target language and must be formulated in it; our goal is to
describe the cognition responsible for deriving the linguistic expression from the
thought. Our target is not what the substrate of thought (i.e. the ‘language of thought’)
is itself, but the cognition of the ‘translation’ from thought to language.
Fundamentally, linguistic expressions are arrangements of words, morphemes,
and constructions that yield particular meanings; the task of expressing thought in
language, then, can be described as coming up with an arrangement of these elements
that will yield an appropriate meaning. Our approach to investigating this will therefore
involve exploring meaning construction in language (the mechanisms by which
arrangements of linguistic elements yield particular meanings), explicating what is
involved in constructing arrangements of linguistic elements, and identifying the
cognition used to find a suitable arrangement. We will see over the course of the
discussion that this cognition is a kind of abduction (the production of a cause for a
desired target effect) that is driven by background knowledge of meaning construction. ...

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