Recently I read a book called Pulsion (French for Drive, but there's no official English translation yet) by Frédéric Lordon and Sandra Lucbert. It's a book about philosophy and psychoanalysis, not linguistics, but there's an idea in it which I would be interested to approach from a linguistic point of view. And since they don't reference many works outside of philosophy and psychoanalysis I'm wondering if it has been investigated before.
The book's ambition is to ground psychoanalysis in Spinoza's philosophy. They go over the most important stages of human development, using Spinoza's propositions to identify the necessary aspects. And in particular, they have something to say about language acquisition.
Spinoza defines memory in the following way:
If the human Body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, then when the Mind subsequently imagines one of them, it will immediately recollect the others also.
In other words, when you perceive something it leaves a mark which allows you to recollect the perception. When you perceive several things together you automatically make an association, which is reinforced each time you receive the same perceptions together again. In the end your memory becomes a network of linked perceptions, where the links are formed by your personal history.
According to Lordon and Lucbert, this is also how language acquisition works. We learn the meaning of words by perceiving their spoken/written/signed form together with the object they refer to, or together with other words which remind us of previous perceptions and they combine to form an approximated idea of what we're talking about. For them there is nothing special about language, it's not a module we have in addition to memory and other cognitive faculties, it is a consequence of how our memory stores and structures impressions.
Now, I don't know all the theories, but I get the impression that linguists tend to think of language as something apart from other perceptions. In formal linguistics there is a separation between syntax and semantics, which are usually described in different systems. And semantics is usually described in terms of logical forms, not of connected perceptions. Not to mention pragmatics, which seems to be an after-thought, something that can't be formalised which marginally alters the essential logical meaning of the utterance.
I get the impression that the spinozist view could unify syntax (the structure of memory) with semantics and pragmatics (perceptions stored and evoked by linguistic signs depending on context and personal history). Has this kind of approach been tried before in linguistics? And would it be supported by current research in cognitive/neuroscience?
