A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE1

Abstract

Language has been given a largely structural definition by linguistics, but in order to have a psyclhological theory of language, the struc- tural emphasis must be replaced by a func- tional one.What must an organism do in or- der to give evidence that it has language?More specifically, when is a response a word?A se- quence of responses a sentence?What makes one response sequence an assertion or predication, another an imperative, still another a question?In this paper I try to give these questions the most general answers possible, general in the sense of relieving them of their exclusively human form.The functions an organism carries out when engaged in language need to be separated from the form these functions take in man.Not only human phonology but quite possibly human syntax may be unique to man; both may encompass mechanisms not found in any other species (Chomsky, 1965; Lenneberg, 1968).But if this is so, it does not commit the mechanisms of logic and semantics to the same status.The latter may be more widely distributed and it may be them, not the hu- man form of syntax and phonology, upon which the basic functions of language depend.Strict Training Procedure: A Recipe for Teaching Language Functions This paper is organized around two inter- locking lists.The first is the list of functions, the things an organism must do in order to give evidence of language.The ideal list of this kind will be exhaustive, although pres-

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