Language is for communication.

It seems that my opponent has, unfortunately, forfeited. It seems that my opponent has been rather busy of late, and as such, I urge that the voters do not punish him for this. I will only use this round to clarify the final point I made last round.It is widely accepted among linguists that our brains process language first as a deep structure (or D-structure), which is then turned into a surface structure (S-structure) after movement: For example, the question Why won't Zaradi take off his shirt? has a deep structure, Zaradi won't take of his shirt why. The deep structure conforms to English's normal SVO order, as you can see.You may be tempted to think that semantic interpretation takes place at D-structure because this is where thematic roles are assigned. Consider:D-structure: ---- was praised JMK in the compliments box.S-structure: JMK(i) was praised t(i) in the compliments box.In D-structure, insulted assigned the role of patient to JMK. Yet this interpretation is problematic. Let's alter the above sentence:D-structure: JMK believed -------- to be praised himself.S-structure: JMK(i) believed himself(i) to be praised t(i). At D-structure, himself is not bound in its governing category because there is no co-indexed element within the inflection phrase to be insulted himself(i) in the truth boxwhich c-commands it.I know that most of us may not be familiar with these terms. As an analogy, refer to this sentence:JMK believed that someone insulted himself in the truth box.Here, we know 'himself' refers to 'someone', which c-commands it. We would never interpret 'someone'as JMK.Clearly, himself is not defined at the D-structure, or himself in JMK(i) believed -------- to be insulted himself(i) in the truth box would not make any sense. As a solution, linguists have proposed that after the S-structure, the sentence being processed branches out into a phonetic form for the sensorimotor system to produce, and a logical form where semantic interpretation takes place. This gives us a T-diagram proposed at the end of the 1990s (I added the sensorimotor and conceptual-intentional systems myself) (1): Details about the logical form are too technical to go over here, but it resolves anaphoric expressions like the ones above, as well as scope ambiguity and so on. The logic form serves as a semantic interface between our computational system* and our conceptual-intentional system. The point is, if the meaning is very clear at the semantic interface but less clear at the phonological interface (even if, as we have seen above, the phonological interface can be designed to be clear semantically), we can conclude that language is more suited for thought than for communication, and posit that language evolved primarily for the expression of thoughts and not for communication.*The computational system can either be viewed as the language faculty itself, or a component of the language faculty, which is also composed of the sensiromotor and conceptual-intentional systems. The former view is heavily criticised by linguists such as Pinker and Jackendoff (2005) (2), but this does not concern us here.(1) Cook, V.J. and Newson, M. (2007): Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.(2) Pinker, S. and Jackendoff, R. (2005): The faculty of language: what's special about it?