From Grammar to Science: New Foundations for General Linguistics. Victor H. Yngve
Ray Reighart · The Library Quarterly · 1998
laws of logic rather than with description of contingent, concrete realities. He therefore sees any discourse that uses these concepts as doomed to be unscientific. Yngve's solution is that we should "abandon ... logical-domain theories entirely and mov[e] to the physical domain." We can observe the physical patterns of airwaves transmitted from speakers to hearers, as well as observing people as mobile bodies and the inanimate furniture of the environments in which speech occurs. Yngve outlines an abstract notation suitable to record lawlike relationships among properties of these physical complexes. "Because this notation can be programmed on a computer it can be used to test large-scale ... models"; and, because it refers to fundamental phenomena below the level of linguistic controversies, it "can be freely shared among different linguists .... Gone will be the babel of arbitrary grammatical notations, each to be discarded in turn." Yngve deserves credit for taking seriously the