Most words are "lexical words", i.e. nouns signifying "things", the majority of which are abstract concepts rather than physical objects in the world; only "proper nouns" have specific and unique referents in the everyday world. The communicative function of a fully-functioning language requires the scope of reference beyond the particularity of the individual instance. While each leaf, cloud or smile is different from all others, effective communication requires general categories or "universals". Anyone who has attempetd to communicate with people who do not share their language will be familiar with the limitations of simply pointing to things, given that the vast majority of lexical words in a language exist on a high level of abstraction and refer to classes of things such as "buildings" or to concepts like "construction". We lose any one-to-one correspondence of word and thing the moment we group instances into classes. Other than lexical words, language consists of "function words" or grammatical words, such as "only" and "under" which do not refer to objects in the world at all, and many more kinds of signs other that simple nouns. The notion of words as labels for concepts assumes that ideas exist independently of words and that ideas are established in advance before the introduction of linguistic structure. Clearly, language is not limited to naming things existing in the physical world, but includes non-existent objects and ideas well. The nomenclaturist stance, in viewing words as labels forpre-existing ideas and objects, attempts unsuccessfully to reduce language to the purely referential function of naming things. Things do not exist independently of the sign systems which we use; "reality" is created by the media which seem simply to represent it. Language does not simply name pre-existing categories; categories do not exist in "the world" . e. g. "where are the boundaries of a cloud; when does a smile begin". Such an emphasis on reality as invariably perceptually seamless may be an exaggeration; our referential categories do seem to bear some relationship to certain features which seem to be inherently salient. Within a language, many words may refer to "the same thing" but reflect different evaluations of it. For example, 'one person’s ’hovel’ is another person’s’home’ Meanwhile, the signified of a word is subject to historical change. In this sense, "reality" or "the world" is created by the language we use: this argument insists on the primacy of the signifier. Even if we do not adopt the radical stance that "the real world" is a product of our sign systems, we must still acknowledge the lack of signifiers for many things in the empirical world and that there is no parallel correlation between most words and objects in the known world at all. Thus, all words are "abstractions", and there is no direct correspondence between words and "things" in the world.
Most words are "lexical words", i.e. nouns signifying "things", the majority of which are abstract concepts rather than physical objects in the world; only "proper nouns" have specific and unique referents in the everyday world. The communicative function of a fully-functioning language requires the scope of reference beyond the particularity of the individual instance. While each leaf, cloud or smile is different from all others, effective communication requires general categories or "universals". Anyone who has attempetd to communicate with people who do not share their language will be familiar with the limitations of simply pointing to things, given that the vast majority of lexical words in a language exist on a high level of abstraction and refer to classes of things such as "buildings" or to concepts like "construction".
We lose any one-to-one correspondence of word and thing the moment we group instances into classes. Other than lexical words, language consists of "function words" or grammatical words, such as "only" and "under" which do not refer to objects in the world at all, and many more kinds of signs other that simple nouns. The notion of words as labels for concepts assumes that ideas exist independently of words and that ideas are established in advance before the introduction of linguistic structure. Clearly, language is not limited to naming things existing in the physical world, but includes non-existent objects and ideas well. The nomenclaturist stance, in viewing words as labels forpre-existing ideas and objects, attempts unsuccessfully to reduce language to the purely referential function of naming things. Things do not exist independently of the sign systems which we use; "reality" is created by the media which seem simply to represent it. Language does not simply name pre-existing categories; categories do not exist in "the world" . e. g. "where are the boundaries of a cloud; when does a smile begin". Such an emphasis on reality as invariably perceptually seamless may be an exaggeration; our referential categories do seem to bear some relationship to certain features which seem to be inherently salient. Within a language, many words may refer to "the same thing" but reflect different evaluations of it. For example, 'one person’s ’hovel’ is another person’s’home’ Meanwhile, the signified of a word is subject to historical change. In this sense, "reality" or "the world" is created by the language we use: this argument insists on the primacy of the signifier. Even if we do not adopt the radical stance that "the real world" is a product of our sign systems, we must still acknowledge the lack of signifiers for many things in the empirical world and that there is no parallel correlation between most words and objects in the known world at all. Thus, all words are "abstractions", and there is no direct correspondence between words and "things" in the world.
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