Re: THEORY: What IS language anyway?

Interesting post.

That post reminds me of the "file card" analogy used in several discussions
of "Information Packaging", "Information
Structure", "Informatics", "Discourse Pragmatics", "Discourse Structure",
and "Discourse Semantics".

In effect, when a speaker utters a declarative, the speaker and the
addressee:
1) Either "select an existing file card" or "create a new file card".
2) Either "select an exiting line on the card" or "write a new line on the
card."  (If it's a new card, it can only have a new line.)
3) Either "fill in the blank on that line", or "reaffirm the current value
of that line", or "overwrite the previous value with a new value".  (If
it's a new line, filling in the blank is the only option.)

See:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/buring/webpage/CDBuring.html

and maybe
http://www.ethnologue.com/LL_docs/index/\
Informationstructure(Linguistics).asp