| With the assistance of sunshine, water, air and language, our human being could thrive from the harshness of the great nature and continue laboring, living and multiplying just as our forefathers did. Except for our human beings, no other biological materials are endowed with the ability to grasp the true and genuine language of our human beings all over the world. According to the definition of the philosophers in ancient Greek, those savage people were disdainfully categorized as "barbarians’", i.e.’a member of uncultured and brutish people without the ability of language, or with a teasing name, "talking animals". Since the first day when our human language was defined as "the sole intermediary between a force of ideology and another force of ideology", we have never ceased from the exploration of an ultimate truth and proposition of ourselves:what is language at all?The ultimate purpose of this study is to put forward and demonstrate systemically an innate and unique mechanism of our human being, namely the lingual tropism of all mankind throughout the emergence and development of human language. Lingual tropism:is an innate, integrated and essential ability of human being, which differentiates our human being, as the superior animals, from the lower lives. Lingual tropism regards every substance and materials of the objective world as a kind of linguistic symbols or signs, and serves as a solid foundation of the process of human perception, comprehension, employ, and creation of the linguistic symbols or signs as well. As an essential hypothesis of human language, lingual tropism makes an attempt at testifying the integrated part of Humboldt’s theory, i.e. The substantial existence of the "mental chain", which was hidden innately and instinctively in every people’s mind and employed as a pivotal instrument in the process of mutual understanding, daily communication and self-expression of the mankind. Meanwhile, lingual tropism also functioned as an excellent complement to the missing link between signifier and the signified of the theory of Saussure. Without the existence of this link, however, the function of signifier and the signified of linguistic symbols in our human language would fail to fulfill the mission of mutual understanding and people’s communication. In addition, based upon the solid theoretical foundation of lingual tropism, metaphor, serving as the sole instrument of lingual tropism in fulfilling its mission, contributed enormously to the formation of various linguistic symbols, namely the concrete vocabulary in each language. Thus, the transitional period of human concepts or ideas from a substantial aspect to the aspect of abstract could be viewed as a constant evolution of our linguistic symbols, as well. Accordingly, from the initial stage of this evolution in the process of the emergence of human language, metaphor itself has also experienced several different stages of development. To be specific, the whole process of the emergence and development of human language is nothing but an outcome of the successive and constant operation or performance of metaphor. |
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