Conscious memory is sometimes also referred to as declarative memory, or memory that can be declared. They operate largely automatically we know intuitively how to construct a sentence, but do not really know how we do it. The rules of language are in large part overlearned and unconscious, and even linguists have not completely articulated how those rules work. First is the distinction between unconscious and conscious memory. Long-term memory is itself divided into several components, each also serving a necessary function in linguistic communication. Because language is sequential, we need short-term memory (working memory) as a moving window of consciousness if we are to integrate over time to make sense of sentences, and indeed stories. Memory, in all its forms, is critical to language. Whereas Chomsky proposed that I-language evolved in a single step well after the emergence of Homo sapiens, I suggest that generative imagination, extended in space and time, has a long evolutionary history, and that it was the capacity to share internal thoughts, rather than the nature of the thoughts themselves, that more clearly distinguishes humans from other species. I argue that the generativity of mental time travel underlies the generativity of language itself, and could be the basis of what Chomsky calls I-language, or universal grammar (UG), a capacity for recursive thought independent of communicative language itself. Episodic memory is part of a more general capacity for mental travel both forward and backward in time, and extending even into fantasy and stories. Language could not exist without memory, in all its forms: working memory for sequential production and understanding, implicit memory for grammatical rules, semantic memory for knowledge, and episodic memory for communicating personal experience. School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
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