ABSTRACT
Perhaps the main message of this book is that language is worth studying for its own sake. In the same way that scientists have sought for many hundreds of years to understand the nature of the universe, the secret of living things and the functions of the human body, grammarians and other linguists have struggled to understand more about how human language is structured and to explain how communication takes place. Some people, however, not only find this objective daunting but they fear that the analysis of language, even a functional analysis, may subtract from the richness and beauty of language. The American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett (1991: 454) writes about explanations in the following way:
When we learn that the only difference between gold and silver is the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, we may feel cheated or angry — those physicists have explained something away: the goldness is gone from the gold; they've left out the very silveriness of silver that we appreciate. And when they explain the way refection and absorption of electromagnetic radiation accounts for colors and color vision, they seem to neglect the very thing that matters most. But of course there has to be some ‘leaving out’ — otherwise we wouldn't have begun to explain. Leaving out something is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations.
