Space and the Vision-Language Interface: A Model-Theoretic Approach (original) (raw)

Space and The Language-Vision Interface: A Model-theoretic Approach

Biolinguistics 5(3), 170-225. , 2011

""The relation between spatial Vision and spatial Language has always been a source of controversy. Three problems can be identified as in need of a solution. A first problem pertains the nature of the minimal information units that make up spatial Vision and Language. A second problem pertains the “dynamic” aspects of Vision and Language, or what visual information “to” and similar adpositions correspond to. A third problem pertains how these different types of information are related one another, and what is the status of this “interface”, especially within a broader theory of Cognition and Language. The solution proposed here consists in a formal (modeltheoretic) treatment of visual and linguistic information, both static and dynamic, and is couched on (a simplified form of) Discourse Representation Theory. It is shown that this solution is consistent with general theories of Cognition, and may shed some (novel) light on the nature of the FLN/FLB distinction.""

Language as a source of evidence for theories of spatial representation

Perception, 2012

David Marr's metatheory emphasized the importance of what he called the computational level of description--an analysis of the task the visual system performs. In the present article I argue that this task should be conceived of not just as object recognition but as spatial understanding, and that the mental representations responsible for spatial understanding are not exclusively visual in nature. In particular, a theory of the visual system must interact with a theory of the language faculty to explain how we talk about what we see--and how we see all the things we talk about as though they are part of the perceived world. An examination of spatial language both raises the bar for theories of vision and provides important hints for how spatial understanding is structured.

How space gets into language: a novel approach

Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, 2010

There exist several proposals regarding the relation between Cognition and Language with respect to 'Space', our understanding of objects and their changing position in the world. Some earlier approaches assume that Language conveys a radically impoverished amount of information than that processed at a visual level (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). More recent approaches instead argue that 'spatial language' is closer in richness to 'spatial cognition', but do so by positing a blurrier boundary between the two levels of comprehension (Coventry & Garrod, 2004). In this paper I will offer an argument for a novel synthesis of these two positions, based on what counts as 'spatial cognition' and 'spatial language', and what core properties can be found across these two levels of information-processing. I will also propose that there is also a crucial difference between these two levels: that of fine-grainedness, namely the amount of information we wish to convey and to omit when we produce a sentence regarding objects and their position.

Language, Space and the theory of Semantic Forms

This paper, which is a synthesis of several previous publications, analyzes some of the principles according to which it is possible to build an analogy, or even a continuity, between language and perception. Several misleading options are identified, arising from erroneous models of perception, and the non-taking into account of polysemy as a fundamental property of language. The key question of the relation between spatial and less- or non spatial uses of words will lead us to come back to the Gestalt and phenomenological theories of perception and action, which more than ever offer irreplaceable insights for semantics. We then sketch a radically dynamical theoretical framework, which gives a fundamental role to the mathematical concepts of instability. On this basis, the microgenesis of what we call Semantic Forms can be distributed between three layers of meaning, or ‘stabilization and development phases’, named motifs, profiles, and themes.

Concepts of space and spatial language

1989

Development of a comprehensive model of spatial relations is important to improved geographic information and analysis systems, and also to cognitive science and behavioral geography. This paper first reviews concepts of space. A critical distinction is between small-scale spaces, whose geometry can be directly perceived through vision and other senses, and large-scale space, which can be perceived only in relatively small parts. Fundamental terms for spatial relations often are based on concepts from small-scale space, and are metaphorically extended to large-scale (geographic) space. Reference frames, which form an important basis both for spatial language and for spatial reasoning, are discussed. Lastly, we set as a short term but important goal a search for geometries of spatial language.