9. Human speech perception and an evolutionary semantics

I listen to two people speaking in a language which is unknown to me. Do I therefore hear them talk?Henri Bergson (1991:109) Linguistic conventions and standard forms do not leap full grown from the egg. Jerome Bruner (1983:69) Let us … consider again spiritual living beings, those beings animated in a special sense, i.e. human beings (but of course all animals are included)…. [T]he apprehension of that person there, who dances, laughs when amused, and chatters, or who discusses something with me in science, etc., is not the apprehension of a spirit fastened to a Body…. [I]n his movements, in his action, in his speaking and writing, etc., [the person] is not a mere connection or linking up of one thing, called a soul, with another thing, the Body. The Body is, as Body, filled with the soul through and through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc. Likewise, so is every human performance, every human production. Edmund Husserl (1989:251–52)