PENTLAND@SRI-AI.ARPA (04/05/84)
[Forwarded from the CSLI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
Issues In Language, Perception and Cognition
WHO: Len Talmy, Cognitive Science Program and German Dept., UC Berkeley
WHEN: Monday April 9, 12:00 noon
WHERE: Room 100, Psychology
How Language Structures its Concepts
Languages have two kinds of elements: open-class, comprising the roots
of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and closed-class, comprising all in-
flections, particle words, grammatical categories, and the like. Exami-
nation of a range of languages reveals that closed-class elements refer
exclusively to certain concepts, and seemingly never to concepts outside
those (e.g., inflection on nouns may indicate number, but never color).
My idea is that all closed-class elements taken together consistute a
very special group: they code for a fundamental set of notions that
serve to structure the conceptual material expressed by language. More
particularly, their references constitute a basic notional framework,
or scaffolding, around which is organized the more contentful conceptual
material represented by open-class (i.e., lexical) elements. The ques-
tions to be addressed are: a) Which exactly are the notions specified by
closed-class elements, and which notions are excluded? b) What proper-
ties are shared by the included notions and absent from the excluded
ones? c) What functions are served by this design feature of language,
i.e., the existence in the first place of a division into open- and
closed-class subsystems, and then the particular character that these
have? d) How does this structuring system specific to language compare
with those in other cognitive subsystems, e.g. in visual perception or
memory? With question (d), this linguistic investigation opens out into
the issue of structuring within cognitive contents in general, across
cognitive domains.