ACADEMIA Letters

Words as language compatible cultural artifacts

Abdou Elimam

Words are trivial, they constitute the main accessible brick of any language. It is widely
admitted that humans can communicate by using words and rules; i.e. fixing their linear or-
ganization. In general, it is admitted that words refer to objects or events of the extralinguistic
world. This is the best way to get it represented in our minds. Modern linguistics and prag-
matics tend to relativize such a vision after discovering that in discourse words can often lead
to different meanings than what is culturally admitted. Therefore the question is: do words
in culture and words in discourse behave the same way? If not what happens during these
crucial moments when an idea is being transferred to words for uttering?1
My research investigation supports an alternative way of considering words in dealing with
them as hybrid entities. We can say that roughly speaking, the life cycle of words is twofold:
(1) they all come to life as a peculiar symbol recognized as such in their hosting cultures. (2a)
Only from then do their inner features allow a compatibility with our faculty of language and
they can be added to the linguistic tools of an idiom. They function as linguistic output whose
effects are to draw paths to always locally determined interpretations. When the activity of
language enters in action, words are uploaded from our socialized cultural imaginary then
used as benchmarks for local interpretations. It may happen that the benchmark coincides
totally with the culturally socialized one. One peculiarity of human language is that words
become configurations of always renewed meanings (metaphors, hints, etc.). This explains
why we tend to say that language enables the expression of creativity. This second part of the
cycle leads to an extension where (2b) part of the words lose much of their semantic weight
in favor of a grammatical tool configuration; while a great amount ends up in disuse.
Words evolve from symbols to lexicon and to morphemes
If there were a single function that characterizes human tongues and their words it is that
they convey meaning. Why is it so? Our species has always tried sharing meaning between

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Abdou Elimam, elimabdou@gmail.com

Citation: Elimam, A. (2021). Words as language compatible cultural artifacts. Academia Letters, Article 1410.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1410.

1
its members; long before it used articulated tongues. This vital trend brought about an eternal
invention: the making of artifacts used as symbols. Indeed, a handicraft to which a group of
persons agree to endeavor with some meaning will become a symbol. In the sense that it bears
a meaning exterior to it. No human civilization has done without creating symbols; most of
which signaled the identification of specific cultures. Indeed, words are symbols, but they are
special. Words have an evanescent materiality. As they are produced by our voices, their life
cycle is brief. They vanish once their sound-like envelope has been uttered and heard – but
they are kept in our working memory for a while, though. This is where one big difference
with other symbols appears: they do not stand alone. They are part of each and every person
uttering them - the discovery of alphabets changed the situation, of course, but this happened
only 4000 years ago while language is million years old.
Advances in modern science indicate that our faculty of language is biologically set up
when we come to life. It starts to be activated as soon as we first engage in a social relation-
ship. This is how this internal machine enables us to reinvent the idiom we are exposed to.
However, to return to our point, our faculty of language is part of our biological configuration.
Therefore it was naturally and spontaneously that our ancestors used their voice before they
shared phonological units or symbols. This is how words started to feed culture and become
shared symbols. Philologists and linguists have always wondered at the fantastic semantic
potentialities of these peculiar symbols - they have labeled them “linguistic signs”.
Words as portals for semantic constructions
The fact that we all use words when we speak shouldn’t prevent us from re-inspecting their
role in meaning production. If used alone, words act as mere symbols - or signs combining a
signifying with a signified. To become expressive, words must integrate a verbal production
uttered by a speaker. As soon as they are poured into speech, they undergo a lexical metamor-
phosis – and this happens even with sign languages2. Their uttering results from some sort of
intentionality actualized by identified “connectors” - i.e. linguistic items aimed at signaling a
mapping or a blending between interconnected words. This is why linguistics formalized the
phenomenon as a relationship between two terms generally named Subject and Predicate::
[Subject- REL- Predicate] o as first order predicate logic: [PRED(Subject /Predicate)].
The issue of the semantic fixity of words can be valid only if we refer to culture (or dictio-
naries, or encyclopedias, or language teaching, etc.). When it comes to discourse, words shift
towards a new function and act as necessary benchmarks for locally constructed meanings. If
words were to be used in discourse to (always) express what they (forever) mean, then what is
the interest of putting them into phrases, sentences, and propositions? Our problem should,
therefore, be put otherwise. It seems that speaking aims at using words to say something about
them. Be it - among others - to confirm, or to expand, or to change, or to create a new meaning

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Abdou Elimam, elimabdou@gmail.com

Citation: Elimam, A. (2021). Words as language compatible cultural artifacts. Academia Letters, Article 1410.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1410.

2
out of the one they are supposed to stand for. As a matter of fact, words are always an object of
discourse; we do not use them per se (except for metalinguistic or didactical purposes) but as
an invitation to the construction of a mental image (A. Damasio). Even the meaning triggered
by the “context” results from a conceptual construct that conforms to discursive coherence.
In its evolution, our species developed a cognitive skill that consists in collecting a word
(from our memorized cultural dictionary) and deconstructing it to communicate only some of
its direct or indirect features.
Frames as source of coherence and shared comprehension
Cognitive neuroscience shed light on the fact that our cognition is a continual process
that starts around birth and develops all life long. This is due to our brain’s natural trend
to adapt to the external (and even the inner) world in integrating its representations under a
neural format and storing their features in different cortical zones. The neural management
of cognition consists in the articulation of neuronal networks. The semantic frames theory
(Ch. Fillmore, G. Lakoff, G. Fauconnier and others) reflects this cognitive disposal where
semantic frames echo - in a way - neural assemblies networks. For a rapid illustration, let’s say
that “Covid19” is a word whose uttering evokes a series of associated themes among which:
viruses, disease, death, vaccines, hospitals, lock-downs, teleworking, distance learning, PCR
tests, conspiracy theories, flights refunds, etc. This framework is precisely a semantic frame
out of which many scenarios could be mentioned, or activated, or referred to by analogy, etc.
This theme evocation potential is what characterizes words in discourse. The interconnection
of these themes is based on a twofold articulation: (1) a social experience - or praxis - shared
by the community, and, (2) culturally biased hierarchy of these themes. The social experience
offers ground to the actancial or “Subject / Predicate” configuration (Who/What does What
to Whom/What How Where and When).This is on the one hand. On the other, culturally fed
visions of the world establish local hierarchies between part or all of these themes. A deep
analysis of such a twofold articulation (social praxis and prototyping) should enable us to
account for what interconnects the varieties of surface structures of human idioms.
The faculty of language as a necessarily wordless universal interface
The cognitive activity of our species is endless and the management of all the stored in
information resorts to the brain’s inner mechanisms. Our knowledge of these mechanisms is
too poor to enable us to describe them. We can only guess how this happens. But one thing
is certain the production and inference of meaning are exclusively cognitive. The modalities
of its expression/reception are numerous: vision, touch, body language, conventional signs,
etc. Language appears as one – if not the best – modality for conveying meaning. To be as
unambiguous as possible, let’s say that language faculty does deal with meaning but it doesn’t
have the function to produce it.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Abdou Elimam, elimabdou@gmail.com

Citation: Elimam, A. (2021). Words as language compatible cultural artifacts. Academia Letters, Article 1410.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1410.

3
 The hypothesis I privilege is that the faculty of language is a biological device aiming
at partly sharing in the brain’s information stocking realm to achieve three types of tasks.
(1) to collect the locally constructed neural assemblies to be communicated. (2) to format
the one-block neural input into a linearized narrative-like exportable configuration. (3) to
transduce the neurosemantic configuration into a phonological string abiding the local cultural
prototyping. In such a configuration, words must be language compatible in that they must
bear neuro-sensible signatures that the faculty of language articulations can grasp. Otherwise
only memory is mobilized.
From such a vision, the faculty of language must be a neutral transducing device. It has
neither words nor syntactic structures or constructions. It must be a wordless universal inter-
face in order to enable translations between natural idioms, for example. Many aspects of this
research have already been published (mostly in French3) but it is still evolving.
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Elimam. A. (2017). Les soubassements énactifs et glottomoteurs de la sémiomorphose
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Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Abdou Elimam, elimabdou@gmail.com

Citation: Elimam, A. (2021). Words as language compatible cultural artifacts. Academia Letters, Article 1410.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1410.

4
 Searle, J.R. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge University Press.
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1The text must be about 1700 words, as requested by the editor. This explains our writing
strategy.
2For a recent discussion: Meir I. & Cohen A. 2018
3See for instance Elimam 2017.

Academia Letters, June 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Abdou Elimam, elimabdou@gmail.com

Citation: Elimam, A. (2021). Words as language compatible cultural artifacts. Academia Letters, Article 1410.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1410.