Dr. Alistair Knott
(University Otago, New Zealand)16. januára 2013
14:00 - 15:30
FMFI UK v Bratislave (I-9)
pozvánka pre teoretických lingvistov, neurovedcov, kognitívnych vedcov, informatikov a všetkých, čo sa zaujímajú o to, ako funguje jazyk, mozog a myseľ. Prednáška bude v anglickom jazyku.
Abstrakt:
In this talk, I will propose a hypothesis that links two different disciplines in cognitive science: sensorimotor cognition and theoretical syntax. The hypothesis is that the syntactic structure of a sentence describing a concrete event in the world provides a direct encoding of the cognitive processes via which this event is experienced and stored in memory.
To introduce the hypothesis, I will focus on a single event: that of a man grabbing a cup. This event can be studied from two perspectives. Firstly we can study the sensorimotor processes involved in performing or perceiving this cup-grasping action, and the cognitive processes involved in storing the episode in memory. I will outline a model of these processes drawing on models of deictic routines (Ballard et al, 1997), of action execution and perception (Fagg and Arbib, 98; Oztop and Arbib, 2002), of working memory representations in prefrontal cortex (Averbeck et al., 2002). Secondly, we can study the structure of sentences which describe the event of a man grabbing a cup: for instance, "The man grabbed a cup", and its equivalent in other languages. In the theoretical framework I will adopt (a version of Chomsky's Minimalism), the sentences which describe this event all have the same underlying syntactic structure (called 'Logical Form'), from which their different surface forms are derived by language-specific transformations. My proposal is that the Logical Form of a sentence describing the cup-grabbing event can be read as an encoding of the processes via which the event is experienced and stored in memory.