Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
This chapter takes the concept of a neuronal grammar developed earlier as a starting point. The earlier proposal is partly revised and extended to cope with problems put forth by natural language phenomena.
The three phenomena considered here are as follows:
The distinction between a constituent's obligatory complements and its optional adjuncts.
The multiple occurrence of the same word form in a string.
The embedding of sentences into other sentences.
All three issues have been addressed occasionally before; however, they were not treated systematically in the context of neuronal grammar. This requires its own discussion because the necessary extensions lead to a substantial revision of the previous concept of neuronal grammar.
The gist of the revision briefly in advance is as follows: In earlier chapters, the relationship between sequence detectors and words in the input was assumed to be static. The word web ignites and then, successively, one set of its sequence detectors is recruited according to relationships the word exhibits to words in its context, as they are manifest in regular co-occurrence of lexical category members. Each word would recruit one of its connected lexical category representations. However, if each word form were attributed to one lexical category, it would be impossible to model the situation in which one word occurs twice in different grammatical roles in a sentence.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.