linguistic questions

[Bernard Bate]

Friends,

At 03:04 PM 4/19/2003 +0200, Celso Alvarez Cáccamo wrote:

>>Ha! You thought I didn't notice that nobody answered my son's question
>>about how people come up with words.
>
>I'll try to not-answer it too ;-).  Though that was not your son's
>question -- I think it was something like "How do people recognize the
>meaning of words".
>
>Anyway, your son's question is poorly formulated for linguistics, that is,
>it's too vague.  It's a good "7-year-old-son-question", but a very bad
>"linguistic student-question" ;-) :

I disagree -- I think Robert's son's questions were lovely (as was the
description of that charming situation).  They clearly and succinctly
articulated core concerns philosophers and children-of-all-ages have been
asking for millennia.  'bad lx student questions' indeed!  Good 7year old
questions are the ones we should continue to ask - and try to answer.

That being said, Celso has some good points in his response.  For a
wonderful discussion of these things see Paul Friedrich's articles, 'The
Symbol and Its Relative Non-Arbitrariness' and 'Poetic Language and the
Imagination' in his _Language, Context and the Imagination_ (Stanford, 1979).

Barney