Husserl on Meaning and Grammar

In the Logical Investigations Husserl sets out the idea of a Logical Grammar as a theory intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are therefore classified into formal categories that match the syntactic categories of linguistic expressions, so that the logical properties of expressions turn out to reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of mental representations, however, it is not trivial to account for how they relate to syntax. Husserl’s take on these issues suggests the following: 1) The syntactic form of representations (both mental and linguistic) carries information about their semantic role; 2) The logical form of representations supervenes on their syntactic form; 3) The phenomenology of thought is broadly language-like.