Brain and Language: Conditions and Limits to understand their Relation

Manfred Bierwisch (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)

Abstract

The human brain is the necessary material basis of natural language. In spite of the general consensus about this basic dependency, there is fairly limited understanding of how this relation comes about and what it consists in. This lack of understanding concerns general conditions of acquisition as well as activation and use of linguistic knowledge. Assuming that Hebbian learning and spreading activation are plausible, perhaps necessary, but apparently insufficient assumptions about principles of language behaviour, four types of impasses will be discussed, showing the gap of understanding with respect to the material basis of the Language Faculty: a) The structure of words, b) the acquisition of words, c) the recurrence of words, and d) the sound-meaning-incongruity. It will be argued that these impasses are not marginal, but characteristic properties of language, the structure of which has to be taken into account in order to come to grips with the nature of language. It might be noted that this sort of incompleteness is the natural situation in many fields of scientific exploration.