**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).   ### *Breathing our way to logic*: physiological constraints and the discretization of (natural) language, from breath groups to LLM tokens What is the _point_ of punctuation? What determines the length of a sentence? And of a thought? Running out of breath is one constraint we rarely think of. Possibly because in thought: streams of consciousness can go on without breath pauses, but this is only possible once we have already dialogically acquired language. Bodily constraints can thus reveal some limits to communication, but also evolve into new affordances through technologies like writing, where punctuation transcends breath markers and structures meaning in novel ways. Following this line of thought, if breath breaks function as natural limits in speech, then breathing itself—and more broadly, all input/output phenomena enabled by cellular boundaries—could be understood as a proto-logic gate: the constraint determining how physiological, and therefore cognitive and linguistic computations become chunked. Margaret Masterman developed the notion of _breath group_, as the chunk of language that can be expressed within a single breath. In natural language, _phonemes_, and in LLMs, _tokens_ are the discrete combinatorial units which generate meaning. Masterman argued that concepts, rather than more basic subcomponents, are the units of language and therefore thought. But how, exactly, do concepts filter through breath groups? If the reason we have punctuation is because we’re used to listen to each other speak and pause for breath, and we can draw the line to how this also determines our logic (the syllogism, at least, for sure) and our interactions with LLMs, then we could understand these, in a way, as extremely complex human breath maps. Through the observations above, this paper traces how breath extends to LLMs, where tokens function as discrete meaning-making units in complex computational systems that inherit the chunking logic first imposed by our respiratory constraints. By examining how breath shapes both classical logic and contemporary LLM interactions, we identify new entry points into language games we have yet to understand the limits of. ### Workshop version Inspired—pardon the pun—by Margaret Masterman’s work on the subject, this workshop comprises two elements: **1)** a presentation exploring breath as logic (and speech as song), and the consequences for our interactions with interfaces such as *LLMs through chatbots*—where the chatbot functions as a breathable layer we can parse, as humans—**2)** a brief practical exploration of these topics, by looking at how we can extend our thoughts, with and without breath.     Some additional 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 compiling Margaret Masterman’s works: >...she developed the notion of a ‘breath group’, corresponding to the chunk^[See: [[Chunk]]. Also, more context: ![[Guberina, Breath as logic.png]]] 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. Lydia Liu, _The Freudian Robot_, p. 24: >... a continuous stream of breath is analog in contrast to speech, which is made up of distinct phonemes that can turn the stream of breath into discrete units. So when writing arrives, it “carries digitization farther by adding artifacts to this physiological process; developing inscription technologies that represent phonemes with alphabetic letters.” (footnote 15 citing Katherine Hayles, _My mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts_, p. 56.) ### Footnotes