Understanding Context

Chapter 8. How Language Works

Thought is made in the mouth.

—TRISTAN TZARA

Looking at Language

TO UNDERSTAND HOW LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS AS SUCH A CRUCIAL PART of our environment, we need to look at how it manages to mean anything to begin with. That means understanding some basics about signs and symbols, the mechanisms of signification.

Language is so much a part of human life, we hardly ever think about it explicitly. Like fish in water, we just use it as a sort of natural human medium. That’s one reason language works so well. If we had to ponder the depths of meaning for every utterance, we wouldn’t get much done. In everyday usage, we frankly treat language in much the same way scholars of the sixteenth century believed language to be: that words are essentially copies of the objects they name.^[172]

Eventually, though, the question of how language means anything became an obsession that nearly consumed the philosophical work of the twentieth century, and especially energized the field of linguistics. Over the years, linguistics experts have broken down the study of language into layers, as pictured in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1. Major levels of linguistic structure, from raw spoken sounds to the complexities of meanings influenced by context^[173]

There is physical, ecological information involved in language, but only at the level of the center circle. (For writing, the equivalent is just the ...