Language and Thought: Signs, Systems, and Theories

Item 8: Language and Art

1. The Sign and its Components

A sign is anything that represents and communicates something. This includes all signs that humans use, such as language, art, and mathematics. Linguistic signs can be differentiated into:

• A signifier: the "perceptible" part of the sign, whether sounds (phonemes) or graphics (letters).
• A meaning: what the sign represents. This meaning can be an object (referent) or a "mental concept."

2. Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics: Parts of Language

• Syntax examines combinations of signifiers.
• Semantics focuses on the study of the meaning of linguistic signs.
• Pragmatics is concerned with the use of language in terms of the relationship established between utterance, context, and actors. It analyzes how speakers produce and interpret statements in context.

4. Features of Language as a System

• Double articulation: Language is organized into two levels: meaningless elements (sounds, letters) and meaningful units (words). The first are combined to form meaningful units.
• Creativity: This important feature means that linguistic systems allow the formation of countless new statements. Language is the privileged realm of the inexhaustible human capacity for invention.
• Conventionality: The relationship between the signifier and the meaning of signs is arbitrary. Signs are conventional in the strict sense that they are not natural.
• Displacement: It is possible to communicate events, facts, and feelings that are not confined to the space and time of the interlocutors.
• Self-reference: Language is self-referential, meaning that language can talk about itself, and human reason is also reflexive. This results in language and metalanguage.

3. Definition of a System: Language as a System

A sign system is a set of elements (in this case, signs) related according to certain standards or rules that work unitedly in relation to each other.

5. Thought and Language: Raising the Issue

Is thought linked to language so that we think in the way that language allows us, or is language modified and adapted to thought?

6. Thought and Language: Linguistic Theories

• For some authors, language determines our way of understanding reality. According to Sapir-Whorf: "Reality is largely made based on the language habits of the community; therefore, different communities live in different worlds. All this means that the world in which men live is a result of the language they speak, as this affects the interpretation of the world."
• Other authors believe that while language determines how we see the world, a speaker can be freed from the prejudices inherited from his language in order to understand reality as it is.
• Some authors argue that thinking cannot develop without language, in addition to all thinking being "thinking language" because we think with language.
• Other authors, such as Piaget, argue that language is an example of human intelligence. They distinguish between thought and non-linguistic language, called sensorimotor intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems and resolve them through behavior.

8. The Language of Animals: Aristotle's Theory

Animals have a voice, sounds, only to communicate and express feelings and emotions. While, as Aristotle said: "The human being has the 'logos' (reason). Therefore, the human being is the animal that 'speaks reasoning': wherefore it is said that human beings have reasoning use of language."

9. What Animal Ethology Tells Us About Language

Ethology tells us that animals communicate through sign systems. Some of them are phonetic signs (sounds). There are systems of signs that are genetically encoded (bees). We know that some higher animals have their own sign systems that are non-genetic, and they vary from one species to another.