Essential properties of language from the point of view--论文代写范文精选

下面将试着概括这些属性的框架，虽然这个框架的基本理论原则并没有得到明显的证明，在语言学领域,尤其是在认知语言学,不过也有一定的解释力。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract 
The structuralist heritage in linguistics continues to obscure the essential properties of natural language as an empirical phenomenon. It is argued that the new framework of autopoiesis possesses a greater explanatory power, as it assumes the connotational nature of language. The key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpretation, intentionality and communication, and reciprocal causality, approached from the autopoietic angle, allow for deeper insights into the essence of language which is as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism involving a system constituted by signs of signs.

The Goal 
Methodological inadequacies of linguistic semiotics (Kravchenko 2003a) have been to a large degree responsible for lack of any serious progress in the study of natural language as an empirical phenomenon, because whether intentionally or not, the true nature of linguistic signs was obscured by the strong beliefs that signs were artificial, conventional, and arbitrary entities intentionally produced by humans for the purpose of communication. Thus the truly essential properties of language remained ignored. 

In what follows I will try to outline some of these properties in the framework of the bio-cognitive philosophy of language, or autopoiesis (see Maturana 1978; Maturana and Varela 1980; 1987; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991; Kravchenko 2002a; 2002b; 2003b). Although the basic theoretical tenets of this framework have not yet gained noticeable recognition in linguistic circles, particularly, in cognitive linguistics as the new paradigm for the study of language, the unquestionably vast explanatory potential of autopoiesis (Kravchenko 2001) lends it as a methodological stronghold for the effort to find solutions to major linguistic issues that heretofore have evaded more or less consistent and/or comprehensible explanation in the framework of the old (traditional) paradigm.

Correspondingly, the key notion of representation proposed by Maturana is also radically different from the traditional one. Representations are relative neuronal activities characterizing the state of an organism’s nervous system as a structure-determined system; because of this, the sequence of changing relations of relative neuronal activity (description) that appears to the observer as determining a given behavior, is not determined by any functional or semantic value that the observer may ascribe to such a behavior but is necessarily determined by the structure of the nervous system at the moment at which the behavior is enacted. It follows that adequate behavior is necessarily only the result of a structural matching between an organism (dynamic system) and its medium. This conclusion gives the entire philosophical discussion about the nature of mental representations a genuinely scientific (naturalist) angle and is a giant step toward understanding consciousness and cognitive (mental) processes.

Phenomenological Nature of Signs 
As a logical consequence from these fundamental premises, the signifying function of linguistic signs does not arise from their direct relation to the external world, it arises from human experience as the basis of knowledge; therefore, it cannot be arbitrary in the accepted sense of the word. The essential non-arbitrariness of signs is sustained by the theory of signs developed by Peirce, particularly, by his concept of indexical signs. Peirce used the term index for the scope of interest of linguistics. However, even Heraclitus paid attention to the main empirical property of the world (and, by inclusion, of language as part of the world) determined by the phenomenological basis of cognition: remember his famous observation, Everything is in a flux. In a sense, he was the founder of metaphysics, for he accepted the idea of the unity of nature. Heraclitus’ successor Cratylus from Athens took his idea to its logical completion when he concluded that it is impossible to refer to one and the same thing twice, therefore, it is possible only by indication. As can be seen, in the historical context of generation of ideas even Peirce was not original.

Conclusion 
Thus we return again to the conceptual direction in the evolutionary history of semiotics (see Clarke 1987) set by the ideas of mental states (Aristotle) or mental words (St. Augustine) which are natural signs (Ockham) or private notae (Hobbes), and to which 19 the notion of index as a type of sign (Peirce) stands in direct relation. This is just another proof of the truism that anything new is a thoroughly forgotten old. Besides, this conclusion undermines the whole palace of structuralism constructed around the concept of sign in general and linguistic sign in particular. For truly, if natural (spoken) language is treated as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism (a description of an organism’s interactions with representations which are in a causal relation with the changes in the environment), then linguistic signs appear to be not signs of components of the medium (that is, physical entities or objects) but of representations which themselves are signs by definition. 

Consequently, language is a system constituted by signs of signs (cf. Peirce’s “a sign for a sign” principle). In turn, linguistic signs as a totality of environmental components constitutive of an organism’s particular behavior (communicative behavior) as a description of the niche of cognitive interactions are subject to change to the extent that the organism and the medium are in a state of reciprocal causality. This explains, in particular, the historical change of language as its salient feature. In addition, since language is a specific medium (a subdomain of the cognitive domain of interactions), or a part of the world, and at the same time an activity of which this medium is the product, its state is determined, in quite a natural way, by the state (the sum total of specific features) of the world, which helps understand the developmental history of human languages and their diversity.

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