Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2022
Modern linguists, like the hermeneuticists before them, insist that language is an autonomous, self-contained system, a module, in which components, whether phonological, semantic, or grammatical, are represented in terms of each other – /b/ differs from /p/ by a single feature “voiced”; bachelor differs from male adult by the feature “married,” and so on (Jackendoff, 2002). As Saussure (1958) put it, “In language there are only differences.” Although, in humans, learning a language appears to also depend on knowledge of the world of reference, what is learned is a language, “an autonomous system existing in the mind” (Katz & Fodor, 1963). These linguistic structures – technically “semantic structures” or Fregean senses, are the meanings in the language that exist quite independently of the ways that those semantic structures refer to the world. Thus, senses are not merely signs; they are meanings defined in terms of each other – dog as an animal, green as a color, up as opposed to down, and so on.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.