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Where are you getting all this stuff from, Daniel? I mean, who are you reading--linguists, philosophers of language, philosophers of mind, historians of language, logicians (modal or otherwise), speech-act theorists? Your second sentence would seem to be gesturing toward J. L. Austin's performative/constative distinction, while missing the point of Christopher's remark about _langue_ vs. _parole_. And, as I indicated in a post yesterday, your statements on grammar seem to be confusing the sort of hard- vs. soft-wiring theories of transformational grammar, say, where an effort is being made to investigate something inherent to human mentation and therefore universal, with grammar-on-the-ground, i.e., as the product of its own historical use/useage within a given language or language group. Every language has a founding grammar, certainly, but no living language has a foundational one in the sense of set in stone, which seems to be your sense. (Gender, as a function of _this_ sort of functional grammar, is one of the most unstable grammatical operations, in fact.) If Old English grammar were "foundational" in your sense, the language could never have evolved into Middle or Modern English. Candice on 2/13/01 8:39 AM, Daniel Jab at [log in to unmask] wrote: > I think you misunderstood me. My take is that when language is being used, > that is, when meaning is being performed then that is when language is. > When we ask what a word means we are no longer performing meaning nor > language, we are performing a philosophical (logical) investigation into > the nature of mind. In the latter we are no longer doing language but using > language as a case study in the analysis of mind. With my earlier post I > was separating the intention of the users of language and the logical > grammar of language. The proper logical grammar is not subject to personal > tastes or whims, it is foundational. However, people can use logical > grammar to what ever ends they intend. These are two different issues. > > >> this smells a bit platonic to me >> ... just because one cannot always and easily put a finger on the > connection >> between ends and means and claim a transparent and univocal understanding > of >> their relation ... does not mean that language is anything apart from its >> instances or anything apart from the action of meaning >> >> ...call me a Hallidayan if you like but I go along with Merleau Ponty when > he >> says ... the meaning isn't on the words like the butter on the bread >> >> langue and parole are aspects of an entity which is indivisible if that >> conception of it is of any use... >> dialectical progression is a way of going somewhere, so is language... > dualising >> and reifying are the same sort of risk... each as unavoidable as the > other ... >> unless one keeps one's big trap shut >> >> >> Christopher Kelen, >> Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, >> University of Macau, P.O. Box 3001 >> Taipa, Macau S.A.R., China