What Makes Natural Language “Natural”? A Phenomenological Proposal

Bibliographic Data

ID8409473
AuthorsHorst Ruthrof (0000-0002-5018-5918, Murdoch University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume55
Issue4
Pages359-377
Publication date2024-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-1773 • E-ISSN: 2332-0486
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00071773.2024.2365716
OpenAlexW4400200724
LanguageEN
References cited43

The paper answers the title question via its methodological commitment to a Husserlian description of the acts of consciousness which we cannot but perform when we engage in linguistic communication. Familiarizing the reader with the central terms of the German Vorstellung and Vorstellbarkeit (imaginability) and their prominence in phenomenological inquiry in the Introduction, the paper addresses major uses of Vorstellung from Kant to Husserl, before identifying imaginability as the hidden core of natural language, captured in a re-definition of language and linguistic meaning. The observation that imaginability affects all linguistic aspects from phonology to pragmatics is followed by the claim that it is primarily a communally shared form of. The last Section offers a speculative, radically gradualist thesis of language evolution in opposition to dominant catastrophe theories, with the conclusion summarising the answer to the title question in terms imaginable, schematized resemblance relations

Natural (archaeology) · Natural language · Natural language processing · Computer Science · Geology · Language and cultural evolution · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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