Living Words

Abstract

Abstract This book follows recent work in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology that rejects the standard, static picture of language, and instead highlights the extreme context sensitivity of natural language. From this alternative point of departure it develops an alternative dynamic theory of the nature of language and the lexicon. This alternative theory rejects the idea that languages are stable abstract objects that we learn and then use; instead, human languages are things that we build on a conversation-by-conversation basis. We can call these one-off fleeting things microlanguages. The standard view has led anthropologists and psychologists to think that languages constrain the conceptual space of language users. It has led to wooden approaches to language instruction on the one hand and to failed attempts at human/machine communication on the other. Finally, the standard view has led to imbroglios in contemporary analytic philosophy on topics ranging from the theory of sense and reference, to scepticism in epistemology, and the problem of vagueness. To see our way out of these imbroglios we need to attend to the more accurate picture of the nature of language as a dynamic object.

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