Naturalness in cognizing and sentencing

pp. 110-138

in: Charles E. Osgood, Lectures on language performance, Berlin, Springer, 1980

Abstract

Unless one makes the assumption that humanoids enjoyed a rather miraculous genetic mutation into full-blown linguistic capability more or less simultaneously with dropping from the trees and using tools, it would seem to be rather obviously true that, before they "had" language, humanoids must have had capacities for perceptually cognizing the significances of things going on around them and for learning to behave appropriately in terms of such significances—if the species were to survive. It seems equally reasonable to assume that, before children of contemporary humans "have" language, they must display exactly the same capacities for acquiring the significances of perceived events and states and reacting with appropriate intentional behaviors—and, of course, they do. These assumptions lead directly to the most general notion underlying my Abstract Performance Grammar (APG): namely, that the basic cognitive structures which interpret sentences received and initiate sentences produced are established in prelinguistic experience, via the acquisition of adaptive behaviors to entities perceived in diverse action and stative relations.