Syntactic structures as traces of senorimotor event representations

Abstract:

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.

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Enquiries: sals@ics.mq.edu.au