- Joined
- Oct 11, 2005
- Messages
- 6,698
- Reaction score
- 1,539
- Location
- The City Different
- Website
- www.chrisjohnsonmd.com
So we’ve got us a new forum! The notion here is that writers use language to write, so how that actually plays out on the page or screen is more than interesting, it is fundamental to what writing is. Thus as writers we should be interested in how language works in the brain.
Various AWers are scholars of language theory. I'm not one of them, but I'm fascinated by what they have to say. So I'm more of a hobbiest, a Lit/Crit groupie, I suppose. Last month we had a long, tangled, and occasionally contentious thread about whether language is necessary for thought. This seems to me to hold true for abstract, complicated thinking.
But what about how language can produce in us immediate emotions that seem to bypass any sort of analytic thinking? How did the words do that to us? Is it a kind of pattern-recognition, in the sense that through the words we experience emotions again that once moved us? How does that work, anyway?
Any notions about it? Any enlightening links to teach us about it? Thanks to Mac for asking me to do this; it could be fun!
Various AWers are scholars of language theory. I'm not one of them, but I'm fascinated by what they have to say. So I'm more of a hobbiest, a Lit/Crit groupie, I suppose. Last month we had a long, tangled, and occasionally contentious thread about whether language is necessary for thought. This seems to me to hold true for abstract, complicated thinking.
But what about how language can produce in us immediate emotions that seem to bypass any sort of analytic thinking? How did the words do that to us? Is it a kind of pattern-recognition, in the sense that through the words we experience emotions again that once moved us? How does that work, anyway?
Any notions about it? Any enlightening links to teach us about it? Thanks to Mac for asking me to do this; it could be fun!