I’ve only studied linguistics recreationally but it’s been a lifelong fascination. For me, I’ve been attempting to discover whatever means I can in order to better understand my own thinking processes as well as aspects of the world around me.
Part of this process has been discovering processes / ways of thought that work for me. It’s been a struggle to find systems that make me go “Ok, that works with how I think”.
Some things I’ve discovered about myself: I like thinking in terms of systems yet my approach to systems is to see them as if “pencil sketches” of reality rather than as rules. [a soft ‘guidelines’ way rather than a hard-and-fast-rules way].
Parts of Chomsky and then Pinker later, while both amazing, left me wanting. They saw/see absolutes where I see “wiggle room”.
Yet Whorf went too far in the other direction, although that’s the direction I tend towards (relativistic as it ties well into my appreciation of a relativistic view of the Universe and its system and processes)
Somewhere along the line, I discovered Lakoff and his “embodied cognition” along with related ideas. That was far closer to my way of thinking than a computational theory of mind as it’s more connectionist. More importantly he expresses the importance of knowledge acquisition being metaphors upon metaphors [using the term metaphors loosely here as it’s more universally understood a word than some of the more specific words I’ve seen].
GAK Halliday was a treat as his systemic functional grammar utilizes non-controversial aspects of grammar and ties it all together in a cohesive system – a herculean effort, giving me the ‘link’ of metaphor within grammar itself – a bridge to semantics. [an example of grammar metaphor might be for example, using Love as a noun rather than the verb of Loving changing its function and concept transport ability, but potentially losing its ‘action’ (making it a statue as it were). This shift can end up being misleading and it is: Love is one of my favorite examples of this. (‘To love someone” is an action yet “What is love?” The noun form of “love” is inherently confusing because it’s not real yet it’s treated as such).
Today, I learned a little about Rhetorical Structure Theory (rst) which looks really intriguing. I could get addicted to it if I start learning more about it.
https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/rstweb/info/
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