1- Autonomy of Language

Language has evolved over milleniums to serve but one purpose - to help communicate effectively and any system which evolves in this way is bound to take into account the purpose it has to serve for its design(language rules). It is therefore, only natural that 'what is to be conveyed' i.e semantic content should affect 'how it is conveyed' i.e. language . I feel that the language does arise from general cognitive functions and is not independent. If language were independent, then for words to 'fit together', one would just have to stick to the syntax but we know of many examples where the sentence is not valid even though the syntax is.

The autonomous view of language is founded upon Chomsksy's work but his theories have failed to help generate an independent grammar which can explain the complexities of the language with a manageable number of rules. Rather, it has proven rewarding to think of the combining of words on the basis of their cognitive meaning eg - 'the meeting is running' and 'Shyam is running' are not the same even though their structure is. This difference can be explained by taking into account cognitive linguistics. Examples such as these and the failure to generate a context free grammar to explain language support my opinion that Language is not autonomous.