Zusammenfassung
The crucial question for the interpretation of natural language is: how does the relation between the sign and the intended referent come about? The preceding Chapters 3 and 4 investigated this question in the context of designing the talking robot Curious. This design is simplified in that cognition and language are limited to triangles, quadrangles, and circles of various sizes and colors. Nevertheless, Curious models the general functioning of natural language insofar as the system can not only talk about new objects of a known type, but also about situations outside its current task environment, such as past or future situations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Literatur
Nevertheless there have been repeated attempts to glorify the mechanics of code transmission into an explanation of natural communication. A case in point is U. Eco 1975, whose theory of semiotics within Shannon & Weaver’s information theory begins with the example of a buoy which ‘tells’ the engineer about dangerous elevations of the water table. Other cases are P. Grice’s 1957 ‘bus bell model’ and F. Dretsky’s 1981 ‘door bell model.’
This is another problem for the speech act theory of Austin, Grice, and Searle (cf. Section 4. 5 ).
In some respects the STAR point resembles Bühler’s 1934 notion of origo. However, the STAR-point is defined as a property of the (token of the) sign whereas the origo seems to refer to time-spatial coordinates and gestures of the speaker-hearer during the utterance.
Many different constellations between STAR- and ST-point are possible. For example, in someone talking to himself the S- and T-parameters of the STAR- and ST-point are identical. Furthermore, the A-value and the R-value of the STAR-point are equal.
If two people talk to each other in the situation of the communication prototype, the T-parameter values in the STAR- and ST-point are practically the same, while the S-values are significantly differen. Furthermore, in a dialog the R-value of the STAR-point equals the hearer, while in the case of someone overhearing a conversation, this person will be distinct from the R-value of the STAR-point.
In logical semantics the speaker — and thus the origin of signs — is not formally treated. For this reason, the model-theoretic interpretation can only be defined relative to an (arbitrary) ST-point. This is of no major consequence in the case of eternally true sentences. In the extension of logical semantics to contingent sentences, however, the formal interpretation relative to ST-points is plainly in conflict with the empirical facts of communication.
Similarly in speech act theory which has attempted to represent the speaker’s intention and action in terms of performative clauses like I request, I declare,etc. These are treated as part of the type (sentence meaning). Thereby the utterance dependent interpretation of 1, of the addressee, of the moment of time, and of the place is left untreated. This may seem acceptable for the communication prototype 3.1.2, but for the interpretation of a post card like 5.3.1 a theoretic treatment of the STAR-point as a property of the utterance is unavoidable.
The importance of the STAR-point is also shown by the question of whether the tablet is real or fake. While the glyphs remain unaffected by this question, the different hypotheses regarding authenticity
In a novel, the real STAR-point may be of little or no interest to the average reader. Nevertheless it is explicitly specified. The name of the author, Thomas Mann, is written on the cover. The intended recipient is the general readership as may be inferred from the text form ‘book.’ The time of the first printing and the place of publisher are specified on the back of the title page.
Hearers are often able to continue incoming sentences, especially if the speaker is slowly producing well-engrained platitudes describing widespread beliefs. This phenomenon shows again that the principle of possible continuations permeates the interpretation of language as well.
The model is realized explicitly as the SLIM machine in Chapters 22 — 24. This autonomous cognitive machine has nonverbal and verbal interfaces to the real world. It is able to automatically analyze its environment and to act in it, and to understand and produce language. The cognitive core of a SLIM-machine is its internal database in which concatenated propositions are stored.
The SLIM-theoretic model of thought may be viewed as a formal realization of spreading activation theories in cognitive psychology. Different versions may be found in A.M. Collins & E.F. Loftus 1975, J.R. Anderson & G.H. Bower 1981, J.R. Anderson 1983, D.E. Rumelhart, P. Smolensky, J. McClelland & G.E. Hinton 1986 and others.
Conventional systems of language production are based on the attempt to avoid a general modeling of thought, treating conceptualization instead as a special procedure. It selects and structures the contents to be mapped into natural language. Thereby conceptualization and realization are handled as two separate phases.
The data structure used for language production by conventional systems are sets of constituent structures called a ‘tree bank’, a set of logical formulas, or similar knowledge representations. These representations have not been designed for a time-linear navigation and are therefore not suitable for it (cf. Section 22.2). Typical problems of conventional production systems are the extraction,the 11 Whether thought is influenced by one’s language is another question which has been hotly debated through the centuries. According to the Humboldt-Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis the thought of humans is indeed influenced by their respective languages.
The question of trustworthiness, seriousness, etc. of a sign’s author is discussed in CoL, p. 280–1.
Even hypertexts, with their various options of continuation, are designed for a time-linear consumption by the reader. There are, however, special types of books, e.g. dictionaries, in which the entries — for the sake of a specialized access — are ordered, e.g., alphabetically (though the definitions of their entries are of a conventional time-linear structure). Characteristically, dictionaries — like telephone book, inventory lists, bank accounts, relational databases, and other non-time-linear language structures — are not regarded as ‘normal’ texts of natural language.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hausser, R. (1999). Using language signs on suitable contexts. In: Foundations of Computational Linguistics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03920-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03920-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-03922-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-03920-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive