HowLanguage Works

Before language is a system of signs, it is a way of being in time with another mind. A sentence is not only a string of symbols; it is an act of coordination — between speaker and listener, between memory and anticipation, between the world as it is and the world as it is taken to be. How Language Works begins there.

Dan Herbatschek moves through the long structure of the problem — from phonology and the grammar of reference, to the philosophy of meaning and the cognitive architecture of speech, to the silent work of interpretation that every ordinary conversation performs. The book argues that meaning is not lodged inside words. It is built, continually, in the space between people.

Language is not a tool the mind uses. It is one of the shapes the mind takes when it turns toward another mind.