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A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE 1
Author(s) -
Premack David
Publication year - 1970
Publication title -
journal of the experimental analysis of behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.75
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1938-3711
pISSN - 0022-5002
DOI - 10.1901/jeab.1970.14-107
Subject(s) - citation , library science , psychology , computer science , information retrieval
Language has been given a largely structural definition by linguistics, but in order to have a psyclhological theory of language, the structural emphasis must be replaced by a functional one. What must an organism do in order to give evidence that it has language? More specifically, when is a response a word? A sequence 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 human form of syntax and phonology, upon which the basic functions of language depend.