Language, logic, and the brain

Summary form only given. Language is primarily a physical, more particularly a biological phenomenon. To say that it is primarily so is to say that that is how, in the first instance, it presents itself to observation. It is curious then that theoreticians of language treat it as though it were primarily semantic or syntactic or a fusion of the two, and as though our implicit understanding of semantics and the syntax regulates both our language production and our language comprehension. The brain is both a repository of semantic and syntactic constraints, and is the instrument by which we draw upon these accounts for the hard currency of linguistic exchange. With this view comes a division of the vocables of language into those that carry semantic content (lexical vocabulary) and those that mark syntactic form (functional and logical vocabulary). Logical theory of the past 150 years has been understood by many as a purified abstraction of linguistic forms. So it is not surprising that the "logical" vocabulary of natural language has been understood in the reflected light of that formal science. Those internal transactions in which "logical" vocables essentially figure, the transactions that we think of as reasonings, are seen by many as constrained by those laws of thought that logic was thought to codify. Of course no vocabulary can be entirely independent of semantic understanding, but whereas the meaning of lexical vocabulary varies from context to context (run on the treadmill, run on the market, run-on sentence, etc.) logical vocabulary has fixed minimal semantic content independent of context.