The phrase "a picture of language" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing the representation or visualization of language concepts, ideas, or structures.
Example: "In her presentation, she provided a picture of language that illustrated the complexities of syntax and semantics."
Alternatives: "a representation of language" or "a depiction of language".
The more than 300 comments (and close to 100 personal e-mails) in response to my last post, "A Picture of Language," ran the glorious gamut from "love it/taught me to write/thank you, Mrs. Wengler!" to "ridiculous waste of time/confusing/who needs it?" I was delighted to see that 400+ people can get passionate in print about the subject.
One would suppose his model to fit more or less exactly with a picture of language that takes meaning to be the currency of compositional [End Page 567] semantics, and that nameless "something else" ("use," or "implied meaning," or whatever) to be the currency of pragmatics.
The records provide a picture of a language of the same type as Latin or Common Germanic; that is, one that still maintains a considerable part of the structure of the ancestral Indo-European language and has not lost final or medial syllables.
"This next one is a picture of the language structure of the constellation of Orion, believed to be the basis of Mayan," she adds.
In summary, a picture of how language structure and topicality emerge in written text as complex phenomena can shed light into the collective cognitive processes we use to organize and store information, and find broad practical applications, for instance, in topic detection, literature analysis, and Web mining.
Bringing together a number of new findings from archaeology, history, and field studies of environmental management, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China provides an updated picture of language relationships, cultural innovations, and intercultural exchanges.
There are exceptions to this general rule; in some Semitic languages and Egyptian, there are documents that give linguists a picture of what these languages looked like at least in written form some 3,000 5,000 years ago.
Chapter seven, "Languages and Cultures", provides an even broader picture of language and learning.
More recently, one of the most influential works of twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, opens with a lengthy quotation from Augustine's Confessions and a discussion of the picture of language that Wittgenstein sees invoked in it [Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part I, pars 1 3 & 32].
To do so, somewhat eccentrically, he spends a lot of time on the picture of language advanced in the 1960s by the philosopher Saul Kripke, because he takes this to imply that the meaning of words is fundamentally connected to reality in a reliable way, so that scientific language, too, can point to the world unproblematically.
Drawing a picture of the health of Noongar language is difficult owing to the ambiguities of what qualifies "speaking a language", Hanson says – when it means anything from "half a dozen words to speaking fluently" you could say almost all Noongar people speak their language.
