ABSTRACT

Language is an enormously complex phenomenon. As with many complex phenomena, it would be pedagogically extremely hard, in one fell swoop, to begin with a complicated theory that accounted for all its many aspects. This chapter begins by considering a simple theory of language, one grounded in common-sense ideas of how language functions: naive semantics. According to the naive theory, properties and relations are simply the referents of predicates. Naive semantics begins with atomic sentences, and breaks them up into predicates and singular terms. One can make larger adjustments to the theory, or start over from a more informed perspective. Words fall into different grammatical types or classes, syntactical categories. Noam Chomsky's own view of the matter was that the possibility of a universal grammar is an empirical hypothesis about the structure of the human mind, not a metaphysical hypothesis about the very possibility of language.