Can / Could and Will / Would

Different areas... hmm... I'm not a psycholinguist so I cannot really say, but if the Wernicke's area was damaged, you do get fluent but nonsense speech. So I would be tempted to say yes. But if forced to give an answer, then I would say that the "concept" level is a pre-linguistic one, while the logical level isn't. I haven't really thought much about it yet though, plunged straight into syntactical technicalities... how typical. :P I will spend some time thinking about it when I can.

At this level, everyone's interpretations of the word is the same, across all languages. I still wouldn't really call it a word at this stage yet, but merely a logical concept.

I got lost here. If it's not a word at this stage, but only a logical concept, how can everyone's interpretation of the word (which is not a word at this stage) be the same across all languages? I have the sense that this is not nonsense, but that there should be a simpler or clearer way of saying it! I don't think you are saying that all concepts exist in all languages, but something more like all concepts exist in all minds, or potentially could, or something similar.

I notice that you go directly from the concept stage to the syntactic stage. Shouldn't there be a "lexical item" stage? Don't you need more than concepts before you start combining words according to a given syntax?

CJ

suppose i call up a guy who is using a windows machine and want to know if he can see the windows start icon !!!

i can use the sentence " can you see the start icon at the left corner of your screen "

i want to know if i can replace that sentence with

"could u see the start icon at the left corner of your screen "

BTW, may I ask, where are you, JTT?