"localized" in the brain, it is only in that general and rather useless
sense in which all aspects of consciousness, all human interest and
activity, may be said to be "in the brain." Hence, we have no recourse
but to accept language as a fully formed functional system within man's
psychic or "spiritual" constitution. We cannot define it as an entity in
psycho-physical terms alone, however much the psycho-physical basis is
essential to its functioning in the individual.

From the physiologist's or psychologist's point of view we may seem to
be making an unwarrantable abstraction in desiring to handle the subject
of speech without constant and explicit reference to that basis.
However, such an abstraction is justifiable. We can profitably discuss
the intention, the form, and the history of speech, precisely as we
discuss the nature of any other phase of human culture--say art or
religion--as an institutional or cultural entity, leaving the organic
and psychological mechanisms back of it as something to be taken for
granted. Accordingly, it must be clearly understood that this
introduction to the study of speech is not concerned with those aspects
of physiology and of physiological psychology that underlie speech. Our
study of language is not to be one of the genesis and operation of a
concrete mechanism; it is, rather, to be an inquiry into the function
and form of the arbitrary systems of symbolism that we term languages.

I have already pointed out that the essence of language consists in the
assigning of conventional, voluntarily articulated, sounds, or of their
equivalents, to the diverse elements of experience. The word "house" is
not a linguistic fact if by it is meant merely the acoustic effect
produced on the ear by its constituent consonants and vowels, pronounced
in a certain order; nor the motor processes and tactile feelings which
make up the articulation of the word; nor the visual perception on the