Many thanks for your comment. You are exactly right. It’s the relations, the grammatical relations, that determine meaning – and that’s what Chomsky’s structural grammar deals with…Meaning is not derived from a serial accumulation of words but from deep grammatical relations. This focus on the grammatical relations as the key to producing meaning..means that for humans, language can be creative, you can develop new meanings, multiple meanings, etc. Animals cannot do this with their communication systems.
And yes, Whorf-Sapir, and the other sociolinguists (eg, Basil Bernstein) with their relativism, their view that cognition is confined to the words in your vocabulary…have indeed been shown to be wrong.
The reference to Cartesian linguistics (#26 Pathena) is valid, for Chomsky was referring to the notion of language development and cognition of the Cartesian era, which was an era focusing on how the mind operates and develops knowledge in relation to the external reality. Chomsky’s focus on cognition, as a specifically human capability based in logical grammatical relations, fits into this analysis.
