In Jesper Hermannâ??s article, â??The Language Problem,â?? he brings up the point that language doesnâ??t exist without people who understand it because it is an entity whose ends are more important than its means. It doesnâ??t merely exist as marks on a piece of paper or as sound wavesâ??it exists as a meaningful connection between the people using it and the world. All three partsâ??people, language, and worldâ??mutually influence one another. There is no set meaning for an individual word because we can never know exactly what a wordâ??say pumpkinâ??means to anyone else. Our prototype, formed by our own experiences, is certainly not identical to everyone elseâ??s. We discussed this in class, and I think decided that it is both a limitation to language and a fortunate trait because otherwise it would limit our own imaginings to words. It might almost seem as if everyone had clipart stored away in their minds, and that would definitely remove much of languageâ??s productive quality.
Hermann cites what William James saw as one of languageâ??s biggest failings, which is that one person can come to the wrong conclusion from what another says. In other words, one personâ??s description will not perfectly put his idea into the listenerâ??s mind. This leads to miscommunication or incorrect assumptions, a major cause of conflict. This continues into the idea that using the same adjective to describe many nouns can then converge to create a noun out of that adjective. The example used is beautiful into beauty. Beauty, however, is too abstract to genuinely understand, and its meaning is derived simply from our history of nouns called beautiful.
The individuality of language makes it difficult to study. Some argue that you cannot study a language without taking into account who is thinking, speaking, and listening (and, I would argue, the time, place, and medium) of the communication because all of the above affect word choice. This seems to turn the studies into individual ethnographies, which collect more detailed information, but they may give science very little objective information to work with because every situation will be different. Standardization in language is hard to come by. Then again, it seems like this is an issue that most areas of psychology are dealing with, so in the end, it makes sense that linguists face the same problem.