From Form to Meaning and to Concept

摘要

We propose a way of connecting the form of a sentence to its meaning and then to its concept. Meaning is the pure, authentic, and unadorned semantic interpretation of form, and concept is meaning adorned by social needs and cultural values in a particular speech community. To frame this view, we borrow the Interface Theory proposed by Chomsky. In that theory, a grammar has three major components: (1) The Computational System, (2) The Conceptual System, and (3) The Sensory-motor System. For a sentence x, the computational system creates a syntactic form f(x), gives it a semantic content, sem(x), then sends it to the conceptual system, to adorn it as a concept, con(x), which the sensory-motor system then processes as a phonetic form, p(x). With this procedure of interface, we can derive a language-specific sentence from its universal origin.