Ironically, the shareability of language is safeguarded by the erosion of associated perceptual structures. We call this process attenuation and the result is attenuated vocables. We define attenuation in theoretical terms as a widening of the extension of the relationship of particular vocables which in turn may lead to transcategorial changes. A relationship can be defined in terms of subject/object such as the lexical uses of have;
I HAVE a house.
A relationship of ownership is established with have between the subject I and the object house. Transcategorial changes may lead to a widening that includes functionalization changes in the syntactic role of vocables. The new syntactic role becomes divorced from it early uses. Again have is a good example; in its functionalized use
I HAVE gone shopping,
have has become an auxiliary and has lost its relationship to its ownership uses.
We come to this definition from examining the dynamics and the resulting changes in behavior of specific vocables along their history.
As mentioned, lexical vocabulary does not scale very well as the spontaneous generation of vocable novelties is not efficient. The solution then is to generate partial novelties from our pre-existing vocable stock.
As vocables are extended in their use to include new contexts, there is a successive loss of the early context and its perceptual cues. We suppose that the loss of specificity reinforces certain specific features that are common across larger sets of circumstances. For example, consider the perceptual structures associated with the experience of one specific cat. These associations may involve features characteristic of that cat, such as say, black and white spots, short hair, four legs, small, meows, big eyes, loner, and more. These same perceptual structures may also be rich in associations of features that are not specific to that cat such as the room it is in, the time of the day, smells floating about, and so on.
As the experience of cat is extended to include many more cats, some of the richness of the initial perceptual structures will be shed, such as the specific-to-this-cat features. Some of the specific features of the initial cat, such as short hair, black and white, etc. will also be shed. The resulting cat description may only involve perceptual structures that are much less specific, such as say, four legs, loner and meows. The consequence of this dynamic is to increase the efficient use of synaptic resources. However, as specificity diminishes, the ease of use for particular vocables is impaired. In our example, the set of cat items that may be included in the category will become increasingly difficult to identify. Do we include lions? They do not meow and they live in a pack. We know that lions do belong to the cat family, but only after biologists have defined more detailed criteria to give us a specialized description of what constitutes a cat.
Cat is a noun that belongs to a set of lexical vocables that become attenuated but not to a large extent. The extension of its relationship to biological creatures becomes wide enough to include lions or even to refer to someone as being catty or a cool cat, but none of these uses strays much from involving cat-like features.
In the case of some other types of vocables - such as our example have and much of the relational vocabulary, which include over, without, as far as, in fact, etc... and logicalized vocabulary such as and, or, if, not etc. - the syntactic structure of their use can change dramatically as the result of attenuation. In fact, we suggest that all the examples of changes in language that we have provided so far are the result of a process of attenuation. However we have yet to explain the role of this process in the shareability of language.