Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The standard textbook accounts of language say that specific languages such as French or German consist of three components: a phonological component that determines how words and sentences are pronounced, a syntactical component that determines the arrangement of words and morphemes in sentences, and a semantic component that assigns a meaning or interpretation to words and sentences.

It is sometimes said that people think in words.

They think in images of words.

So, for example, when you change a sentence around, the words (and morphemes) do not lose their identity.

Unlike baking a cake where the ingredients are changed by being mixed together, forming a sentence does not change the words and morphemes that are being mixed together; and you can have a sentence containing eight words or twelve words, but you cannot have a sentence containing nine and a half words.

Syntactically, a complex element such as a sentence is built up out of simple elements, words and morphemes, according to the formation rules of the language.

By thinking in language we break up our thought into words and sentential segments.

If, for example, I am dancing or skiing, the stream of conscious thought need not contain any words and can be in a continuous flow.

There is no problem about how I can put the elements of my experience together to form a unity in a way that there is a problem about how I can put discrete words together to form a unified sentence.

And has separate words for each.