info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Pierre-Yves Raccah, « Du pendule de Newton à la communication en langue humaine : les êtres humains sont-ils plus complexes que les billes ? », HAL-SHS : linguistique, ID : 10670/1.d52sgl
The simplest and best known models of interactions in classical mechanics are the ones which describe exchange of energy, of linear momentum or of electric charge between small macroscopic objects, such as balls. I will show that the set of principles classically used to account for what happens in Newton's cradle does not really account for what happens in Newton's cradle and that, moreover, it predicts possible behaviors that are never observable (this, obviously, is not an original contribution but the demonstration is not so old, is generally ignored in school books though it deserves being remembered, and will be useful for the purpose of this paper). Simpler even is the model generally used when dealing with signal and its propagation; it is that model, however, that is almost universally used as a model of human communication. We will see some of the deplorable and piteous consequences of that carelessness on the way meaning is studied in linguistics and on the possible results of such studies. I will suggest a more serious, though more difficult, way to represent human communication and will examine its consequences on the linguistic approaches to describe the meaning of natural language expressions and account for the semantic phenomena.