Darshita Shah | School of Oriental and African Studies (original) (raw)
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The relation between words and its referents in the real world has intrigued scholars for centuri... more The relation between words and its referents in the real world has intrigued scholars for centuries. Debates about whether the origin of words or name for things relate to the referents or entities they stand for, has been written about by the likes of Plato and Socrates. The idea that form and meaning are linked by convention and tradition alone, have come to dominate our modern understanding of language. Language is conceived of as being arbitrarily related to the world, even in Linguistic thinking. At lexical level, the phonological form of a linguistic sign is considered to have no relationship to its meaning. Saussure and Locke have been very often linked by the idea of language being arbitrary.
Dynamic Syntax (DS) claims that humans' knowledge of language is essentially their ability to par... more Dynamic Syntax (DS) claims that humans' knowledge of language is essentially their ability to parse spoken language. It is a formal model designed to capture, how a listener interprets spoken language step by step. DS illustrates the parsing in human brain, through tree structures and shows how a hearer progressively builds semantic representation from lexical and contextual information. The tree structure grows, as each word is parsed. The steps by which, we reach the final output, i.e. the final tree, are as important as the final tree in DS.
The relation between words and its referents in the real world has intrigued scholars for centuri... more The relation between words and its referents in the real world has intrigued scholars for centuries. Debates about whether the origin of words or name for things relate to the referents or entities they stand for, has been written about by the likes of Plato and Socrates. The idea that form and meaning are linked by convention and tradition alone, have come to dominate our modern understanding of language. Language is conceived of as being arbitrarily related to the world, even in Linguistic thinking. At lexical level, the phonological form of a linguistic sign is considered to have no relationship to its meaning. Saussure and Locke have been very often linked by the idea of language being arbitrary.
Dynamic Syntax (DS) claims that humans' knowledge of language is essentially their ability to par... more Dynamic Syntax (DS) claims that humans' knowledge of language is essentially their ability to parse spoken language. It is a formal model designed to capture, how a listener interprets spoken language step by step. DS illustrates the parsing in human brain, through tree structures and shows how a hearer progressively builds semantic representation from lexical and contextual information. The tree structure grows, as each word is parsed. The steps by which, we reach the final output, i.e. the final tree, are as important as the final tree in DS.