- Processes that connect linguistically conveyed messages with one's physical actions on/in the world.
This collectionof interactive processes can be collected into an architectural diagra mof the sort fa miliar fro mPart II.
Themaininnovationisa dashedlinemarkingtheboundarybetweenthef-mind and the“world,”a featuretowhichwe
will return in a moment.
InFig. 9.1, phonology and syntaxhave been compressed intoa singleinterfacethatconnectsthoughtsinthef-mind to
noises in the world, there to be transmitted from one speaker to another. Were we to zoom in on this“language box”
we would see all the elaborate architecture of tiers and interfaces in phonology and syntax discussed in Part II.
What is of interest here, however, is the part to the right of phonology and syntax: the cognitive structures I have
called“thoughts”and the multiple interfaces that access them. Chapter 3 argued that the combinatorialityof language
servesthepurposeoftransmittingmessages constructed from an equallycombinatorialsystem ofthoughts: a sentence
conveys a meaning built combinatorially out of the meanings of its words. So part of our job is characterizing this
combinatorialsystem, representedby“formation rulesfor thoughts”inFig. 9.1. This fallsunderquestion(5)above.In
Chapter 12, we will see that“zooming in”on this component yields an interesting architecture of tiers, just like
phonology and syntax.
Another part of the job is to characterize the interface rules that map these combinatorial structures into the purely
linguistic structures of syntax and phonology—question (6). In particular, we would like to be able to account for
Fig. 9.1The place of conceptual semantics in the f-mind