Variation and Imperfection Their Implications to the Concept of Language

Abstract

The many various definitions of the term ‘language’ make it improbable to account for the nature of the variations within the languages of the world. It seems that the recent and dominant concept of language has certain shortfalls with regard to the accountability and definitions of variations. By giving a different account of certain parameters and by arguing that the human language should be seen as a system of thought having only syntactic and semantic properties, the cross-linguistic variations are considered as various morpho-phonological systems of the many languages of the world, which ought not to be considered as part of the generative language computation. Such arguments will have significant implications to the understanding and definitions of the concept of language. The findings indicate that, if the goal of the linguistic theory is to seek a perfect system and to minimize variations within and across the languages, the term ‘language’ should be seen as a single, natural, universal, and invariant system without assuming that its computation is a double-interface. In such an understanding, the ‘one’ human language should be perceived as a system of thought which has only syntactic and semantic properties; whereas the ‘many’ languages of the world are considered to be the conventional morpho-phonological systems that should not be part of the generative language computation.