Meaning and Grammar in a Parallel Architecture for Language Processing, Giosuè Baggio (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
In this talk I will introduce a cognitive and computational architecture for human language processing inspired by Ray’s foundational work. The architecture features parallel streams for meaning and grammar, drawing from a shared mental lexicon and contributing concurrently to incremental updates of a discourse model. Intermediate representations are generated autonomously within each stream, resulting in a range of possible interactions between meaning and grammar — from dominance and redundancy to competition and conflict. I will discuss linguistic phenomena illustrating these different interactions and describe experimental results confirming the architecture’s processing consequences. I will then present a computational model that aligns with experimental results and that demonstrates the importance of intermediate representations. I will conclude with some considerations on how the architecture attempts to reconcile different explanatory principles and theoretical traditions in linguistics, in the spirit of Ray’s broadly integrative philosophy.