Time, Motion, Force, and the Semantics of Natural Languages (original) (raw)

A Model of Time in Natural Linguistic Reasoning

modern conception of Natural Language Processing intends to explain wording, semantics and syntactical evolution in terms of entropy, chaos and fractals. From this perspective there are many authors that have already presented several clues in that way, and approaches that serve as a basis to explain many of the phenomena existing in any language. Part of this proposal is a short review of main contributions and a set of four rules defined that are part of previous work of the author grouped with the name "Thermodynamic Rules for Linguistic Reasoning". They are part of a larger set of rules mathematically describing main characteristics of language performance in native speakers, in dialogs contexts. The focus of current paper is on time perspective and modeling of the language under the mentioned context. The proposal covers also a use case with data analysis and explanation from the model conception.

The relevance of dynamic systems theory for cognitive linguistics

Historically, dynamic and cognitive linguistics have very few things in common and result from totally different endeavours. The communality is given by a focus on interdisciplinarity of both, in which biological/psychological questions provide the basic motivation and mathematical results shape the type of solutions preferred. In the case of René Thom's proposals for topological and dynamic linguistics since 1968 a long tradition of thought from Leibniz to Poincaré led to mathematical results in the 40s and 50s (Thom, Mather, Arnold) and to a rush for applications which included biology, linguistics and social sciences (cf. Zeeman, 1977). Thom was guided by his discussion with Waddington on biological morphogenesis and expanded this thought to linguistics. In his holistic strategy Thom preferred a gestaltist, geometrical, morphogenetic view on biology and not so much a mechanistic one, which takes the brain as the central (and finally) only "organ" responsible for thought, language and culture.

Language Processing by Dynamical Systems

International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, 2004

We describe a part of the stimulus sentences of a German language processing ERP experiment using a context-free grammar and represent different processing preferences by its unambiguous partitions. The processing is modeled by deterministic pushdown automata. Using a theorem proven by Moore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the processing preferences are represented by a control parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the context of symbolic dynamics theory. We show that applying a wrong processing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invariant set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syntactic reanalysis and repair can be modeled by a switching of the control parameter -in analogy to phase transitions observed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP components are indicators of these bifurcations and propose an ERP-like measure of the parsing model.

(2016) Language, Computation, and Dynamical Systems

The focus of this talk is the nature of cognitive computation, and the relation between computation, linguistic theory, and dynamical systems. We will review traditional notions of computation and analyse their applicability to natural language, distinguishing it from formal languages as usually studied in Computer Science. The main theoretical result of the thesis is that imposing a single computational template for the assignment of structural descriptions to natural language sentences is not only empirically inadequate, but also theoretically more costly than assuming a strongly cyclic approach in which computational dependencies vary, oscillating up and down the Chomsky Hierarchy of formal grammars. The idea that the grammar assigns substrings the simplest possible structural description that captures semantic dependencies between syntactic objects will be referred to as mixed computation. The analysis of theories of computation will reveal that the theory of computable functions must not be identified with the theory of effective computation, and we will argue for the necessity to introduce aspects of interaction in the study of physically realized computational procedures, which configure dynamical systems of a very specific kind: those defined by the irreconcilable tension between opposing requirements.

c ○ World Scientific Publishing Company LANGUAGE PROCESSING BY DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS

2002

We describe a part of the stimulus sentences of a German language processing ERP experiment using a context-free grammar and represent different processing preferences by its unambiguous partitions. The processing is modeled by deterministic pushdown automata. Using a theorem proven by Moore, we map these automata onto discrete time dynamical systems acting at the unit square, where the processing preferences are represented by a control parameter. The actual states of the automata are rectangles lying in the unit square that can be interpreted as cylinder sets in the context of symbolic dynamics theory. We show that applying a wrong processing preference to a certain input string leads to an unwanted invariant set in the parsers dynamics. Then, syntactic reanalysis and repair can be modeled by a switching of the control parameter — in analogy to phase transitions observed in brain dynamics. We argue that ERP components are indicators of these bifurcations and propose an ERP-like me...

Linguistics and some aspects of its underlying dynamics

Massimo Piattelli Palmarini & Giuseppe Vitiello In recent years, central components of a new approach to linguistics, the Minimalist Program (MP) have come closer to physics. Features of the Minimalist Program, such as the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of the Labeling Algorithm that only operates at the interface of Narrow Syntax with the Conceptual-Intentional and the Sensory-Motor interfaces, the difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a sentence and the buildup of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation of sentence structures, are directly accessible to representation in terms of algebraic formalism. Although in our scheme linguistic structures are classical ones, we find that an interesting and productive isomorphism can be established between the MP structure, algebraic structures and many-body field theory opening new avenues of inquiry on the dynamics underlying some central aspects of linguistics.