[Ltg] SALS-SIG Seminar [Alistair Knott, September 2, 5pm, E6A 202]

[Rolf Schwitter]

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SALS-SIG Seminar
Thursday, September 2, 2004 at 5pm
Macquarie Uni, E6A 202
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Title: Syntactic structures as traces of sensorimotor event representations
Speaker: Alistair Knott, Dept of Computer Science, University of Otago

In this talk, I will outline a model of natural language syntax in which
syntactic structures are defined as descriptions or traces of
sensorimotor operations.  The syntactic structure of a sentence describing a
concrete state or event (e.g. 'There is a dog in the garden' or 'The man
grabbed a cup') is characterised as a reflex of the sensorimotor processes
which occur in an agent who directly witnesses it, by observing it or
participating in it. The model of syntax is therefore closely grounded in a
model of sensorimotor cognition.

In the sensorimotor model I outline, witnessing an event or state involves a
sequence (perhaps partially ordered) of separate actions of attention, each
of which brings about a context update operation. Observing the event/state
consists in storing this sequence, and recalling it consists in regenerating
the sequence at some later point. The syntactic model I assume is a variety
of Government-and-Binding (GB) theory, in which sentences have a Deep
Structure (DS) and a surface structure (SS). I will propose that the DS of a
sentence can be read as an encoding of the partially-ordered sequence of
context update operations, which when processed by a hearer evokes the
original sensorimotor experience. The proposal involves a sensorimotor
interpretation of X-bar theory, in which the right-branching structure of
XPs in a sentence (IP, AgrP, VP, complement YP) denotes a succession of
contexts, with the material at each [Spec,XP] and X0 head denoting the
bottom-up and top-down attentional operations which transit between these
contexts.