A FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE¹

Abstract

Language has been given a largely structural definition by linguistics, but in order to have a psyclhological theory of language, the struc- tural emphasis must be replaced by a func- tional one. What must an organism do in or- der to give evidence that it has language? More specifically, when is a response a word? A se- quence of responses a sentence? What makes one response sequence an assertion or predication, another an imperative, still another a question? In this paper I try to give these questions the most general answers possible, general in the sense of relieving them of their exclusively human form.