Incompleteness of structural linguistics: Language communication as a jigsaw puzzle
Incompleteness of structural linguistics: Language communication as a jigsaw puzzle

Summary/Abstract: There exist phenomena in language communication that structural linguistics has notional tools to identify, but does not have the noetic capacity to explain. Homonymous communication situations are one of these. In some homonymous situations, the description of language structure does not provide any, or at least not a sufficiently strong, “buttress” for deciding which of the homonymous meanings fits the particular place of the particular communication. In this sense, structural linguistics is incomplete if its goal is to explain language communication as an on-line process. On what basis do communication participants thus de-syncretize the homonymy encountered in communication if the language means used do not suffice? To tackle this issue, an analogy between a jigsaw puzzle and language communication is drawn. The notion of experiential schema turns out to be a robust homonymy de-syncretization tool and consequently also a possible signpost of a reset of the linguistics horizon.

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