Text in ru:

    Тексты и язык

Translated text in en: Texts and language

The model in natural (Russian) language is a text. Written and oral texts are models, as they allow us to understand something about the world, plan something, communicate with other people, and do all this without the need to carry real things, stick them in each other's noses, turn them around, cut or glue them. (What it could look like can be read in J. Swift's description of Gulliver's visit to the Grand Academy in Lagado.)

Of course, there are many forms of communication (information transfer between thinking subjects, not necessarily humans), and there are many languages corresponding to them: body language (facial expressions, dance, gestures), the language of music, languages of painting and architecture (specific to each direction), data exchange languages, etc. But it is the text that is the standard format of communication into which practically anything else from the field of communication can be translated if necessary, in any language (pictures, graphs, tables, diagrams, music, dance, etc.) Use text if you don't know what to use.

Text can also be in different languages: natural, artificial, controlled, pseudocode, programming language, markup language. Use text in a natural language that is common for you and your interlocutors - if you are unsure what to use.

Next, we will talk about communication expressed in text (we will call both text and what we say aloud here as text). Text has a linear structure, words follow one after another in a specific order, meaning the text has a clear message and assimilation order. Text on a page is read from left to right and top to bottom (not in all languages, but in Russian it is so). The ability to go back, reread the text, or choose which link to follow in hypertext - masks the basic linear structure of the text, but cannot cancel it.

In the text in a natural language, we will call not letters (or sounds) by signs (symbols), but whole words. Texts consist of words; therefore, it is necessary to discuss what words are and how they "operate" in textual models. Understanding this will help to understand how models are structured in general, not just textual ones.

Words in a natural language text are tools of modeling because they refer to their meanings - objects (entities) that are highlighted from the background (the world around us), as we discussed in the previous section. Words also allow working with the categorization of objects of attention, another modeling tool discussed earlier.

We will not discuss the syntax of natural language here - mainly we use the Russian language, and you are familiar with its syntax.

However, if you are going to build machine-readable ontologies in OWL language (Web Ontology Language), build UML diagrams (Unified Modeling Language), model in Archimate language, and so on, then of course, you will need to study their syntax. In these languages, signs are linked according to specific rules.

We will discuss the semantics and pragmatics of natural language later; first, we will talk more about signs.