ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the theories of universal grammar, merge, and the minimalist program as improbable models for explaining the production and processing of language. These are better accounted for by a psychoanalytic perspective in combination with current theories of cognitive grammar. It is proposed here that grammar consists in symbolic relationships among semantic and phonological structures, where syntax is a product of repetition and, ergo, habit. This is not, however, a haphazard process: Language emerges in a continual and preconscious processing via perceptions, anticipations, and perseverations involving condensation, displacement, repetition, and overdetermination, which associate elements within the semantics and phonology of the language in question.
