ABSTRACT
When people associate the use of language principally with the transmission of information, they can lose sight of its other capacities, especially the capacity for speculation and the capacity to date. The capacity for speculation permits people to consider alternatives to the facts as they appear to them. People's cognitions, or thought processes, can continue to gain complexity from their ongoing social character, but verbal performances remain severely restricted by individual competence in the act of speaking. Those suffering from a type of brain damage known as aphasia lose much of this latter capacity to express ideas. By means of the interplay of sounds and contexts, and words and contexts, the invariants of language interact with the requirements of specific speech situations to bring about the production and creation of linguistic expression. The concept of displacement indicates how people can produce complicated acts of thought and speech when no actual stimulus from such events is present.
