This is all very well so far as single words are concerned; it would
account satisfactorily, for instance, for the fact that I call a man
sometimes by his surname and sometimes by his Christian name. But it
is hardly so adequate when we come to the question of sentences. To
revert to the illustration of a moment ago, in response to the stimulus
“Did anything happen on your journey?” you may say either “I met Mr.
Jones in the train to-day”, or “Joseph was in the 9.35 this morning”,
or any one of an indefinite number of other sentences expressive of the
same occurrence. Are we to suppose that, while you were in the train,
you were rehearsing all these different sentences to yourself, so that
each of them became firmly associated with the words “journey to-day”?
Clearly such a supposition would be absurd. Yet all the separate words
of your sentence have many other associations; it is only the sentence
as a whole that is associated with your journey. You have met other
people besides Mr. Jones; you have had other contacts with Mr. Jones
besides meeting him this morning; “train” and “to-day” equally are
appropriate to other occurrences that you might relate. Thus it has
to be the whole sentence that is the associative unit, and yet the
sentence may never have been in your head before. It seems clear that
it is possible to state in words something that you remember, although
you never put it into words before. Suppose I say “What did you have
for breakfast to-day?” Probably you will be able to tell me, though
it is very likely that you have not given names to the things you ate
until this moment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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