The Structure of Experience
barbara tversky, jeffrey m. zacks,
& bridgette martin hard
Continuous Sensation/Discrete Mind
Language
Wholes and Parts
We begin with language, whose structure and organization have been
studied for generations. Indeed, the structure of language has served as
an instructive analogy for that of bodies, scenes, and events, and vice
versa. Here, we overview the features of language that have served the
analogies. Language has distinctive characteristics—at the levels of frequency,phonology, and more—that allow it to be distinguished from
the background of other sound. Language decomposes into parts on
many levels: discourse has as parts sentences or utterances, utterances
have as parts words or morphemes, morphemes have as parts sounds or
phonemes.
Each higher level serves as the whole for a more elementary
level. The bases for segmenting into components as well as the rules of
combination of components change at each level, and in fact vary with
the individual language. The level of phonemes (units of sound) and the
level of morphemes (units of meaning) are most relevant here.
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