**Links to**: [[Margaret Masterman]], [[On Dialogical Reason]], [[Catarina Dutihl Novaes]], [[Physiological]]. >It may be that language *feels*: that it *breathes*. > >Margaret Masterman, ‘Classification, Concept Formation and Language’. >Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, September 1959 (In Chapter 3, 2005: _Language, Cohesion and Form_, p. 69). Why do we have punctuation? What determines the length of a sentence? And of a thought? Running out of breath is one constraint we rarely think of. Breath was the first proto-logic gate: the thing that determined how (linguistic) computations ought to be chunked. Some thoughts on this are in: [[02 Introduction to the Poltergeist]], [[13 Conclusion]], [[04 Concepts as pre-dictions]], and [[Breath]]. Yorick Wilks, introduction to 2005 _Language, Cohesion and Form_ (p. 12), book on Margaret Masterman: >...she developed the notion of a ‘breath group’, corresponding to the chunk^[See: [[Chunk]].] of language produced in a single breath, and that there was therefore a phrasing or punctuation in spoken language, one that left vital structural traces in written language too, and could be used to access its content by computer. ### Footnotes