Abstract

What follows is a byproduct of a larger work in progress that tries to show the benefits of a ‘thought-oriented’ linguistics, in contrast to the traditional ‘sound-oriented’ approach. It seems obvious that language begins with thoughts in the mind of a speaker and ends with some facsimile of those thoughts in the mind of a listener. Sounds make this communication possible, but they are not the driving force behind the structure that language takes. Because sounds are accessible to public observation and thoughts are not, linguistics has always tilted toward the sounds. I believe, however, that much becomes clearer if thoughts are given the attention they deserve. Among other things, thoughts offer a target for triangulation from multiple perspectives. A compelling illustration is the special attention language gives to number marking, which can be more fully understood in the context of ‘subitizing’, studied by psychologists as the special way the mind processes very small numbers. Yet neither linguists nor psychologists seem to have noticed the mutual relevance of these two phenomena. Another illustration can be found in the relation of past tense to memory. The fact that various languages exhibit multiple past tenses suggests that memories from different periods are qualitatively different, but psychologists are more likely to study how well things are remembered, not how they differ. Linguistics could thus serve as a motivation to broader psychological research. To this list of converging concerns one can add the linguistic expression of ‘modality’, which clearly has broader ramifications. This article has prodded me to look a little further in that direction, incorporating the preoccupation with epistemology that is conspicuous in many indigenous languages of the Western hemisphere. The following, then, is a tentative exploration based on three languages I happen to know something about. Its incompleteness should be obvious, but I hope to carry it further.