How Language Works

Language is a system of signs. A way of being in time with another mind. A sentence is less a string of symbols than an act of coordination; between speaker and listener, memory and anticipation, the world as it is and the world as it is taken to be. How Language Works begins there.

Dan moves through the structure of the problem from phonology and the grammar of reference to the philosophy of meaning, the cognitive architecture of speech, and the silent interpretation every conversation performs. Meaning, he argues, is not lodged inside words; it is built, continually, in the space between people.

Language is not a tool the mind uses. It is one of the shapes the mind takes when it turns toward another.