International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

According to N. CHOMSKY: "The person who has acquired the knowledge of a language has internalized a system of rules that relate sound and meaning in a particular way… Evidently, knowledge of language – the internalized system of rules – is only one of the many factors that determinate how an utterance will be used or understood in a particular situation" (1969, p.23).

About the process of internalization, H. ATLAN states, more precisely: "… acquisition of language (can be) seen as a self-organizing system. The older stages or first steps in the process appear as states of indifferentiation, with high redundancy in the sense that many different signs and symbols are equivalent because they have vague, overlapping meanings. It is only at later stages that the language has become more diversified, more differentiated, as a result of a reduction in redundancy such that every sign becomes different in a different specific way.

"Therefore a semantic unambiguous content is not to be found at the beginning of the process as some property to be added to, or part of, built in syntactic structures, but rather at the end of the process; starting from a non specific, polysemic and to same extend presyntatic structure, ending as a strictly defined syntax, while completely non ambiguous meaning as in artificial logico-mathematical language".

"From this point of view the evolution of the semantic component of language is not seen as an acquisition of polysemic and metaphorical meaning, starting from well defined literal, nonambiguous meaning, but just the opposite." (1972, p.245).

However, an important degree of polysemy subsists in any non formal language at the individual level, and most necessarily at the social level. Any creative elaboration of new information depends on it.

From another viewpoint, it should be observed that: "… the acquisition of language is not the result of an organized instruction, but takes place just by immersion in the environment" (A. CLEREMANS, 2000, p.84). Of course, the author means "the social environment". This explains the frequently poor results obtained by any teaching method which does not includes such immersion… as well as the basic acquisition of the mother language without any schooling at all, as a fundamental, but also automatic part of the general socialization process. It is a kind of systemic conditioning.