The selective mode of language use and the quantized communicative field

Starting from the productivity of linguistic meaning, this paper focuses on information transfer in natural language in the most general manner. The author first introduces a ‘selective mode of language use’ (in addition to language's more commonly acknowledged representational mode), and then, as a pre-requisite, a (quantized) ‘communicative field’ for the selective mode to operate on. In their selective use, linguistic constructs serve not to encode, i.e., represent, an item close enough to some given pattern, but instead to select one among the viable options provided by the communicative field that is generated by the linguistic constructs.The notions of the selective mode of language use and the communicative field allow us to capture certain novel mechanisms of natural language communication, as well as to provide a common framework for a number of well-attested linguistic observations, very much like in physics, where one law accounts for a number of physical phenomena.