Re: phonemes and movemes (Asian dancers)


Rob Freeman wrote:

I've only seen him mention "The Brain's Concepts" in this connection,
GALLESE Vittorio; LAKOFF George. Looks like a journal article.
(http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16850667):

"Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning.
They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow
be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are:
Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all
concepts-even concepts about action and perception-are symbolic and
abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain's
sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1)
neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3)
results about the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We
will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of
structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract
concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and
the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the
sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called
abstract concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical
constructions and general inference patterns."

For comparison a quote from "The Birth of Mind" by Gary Marcus
(Basic Books 2004): "... neither Broca's nor Warnicke's area is
restricted to purely linguistic functioning. Broca's area, for example,
seems to be active not just in language but also in the comprehension
of music (even by nonmusicians), in imitation, and perhaps in motor
control. In fact, the more people study Broca's area, the harder it is
to discern exactly what it does. Meanwhile, it appears that syntactic
processing engages other parts of the brain further to the front, and
perhaps "subcortical" areas that are not even in the evolutionary
recent neocortex; studies of word-learning have implicated not just
Wernicke's area but also visual areas, motor areas, and so forth."
I like the connection of language and motor centers, as I myself
am convinced that the evolution of human language went along
with human made things, and evolved from animal language as
the human hand evolved from the animal paw. As for concepts
in the brain: are they perhaps the same as the memes proposed
by Richard Dawkins? Once I read of a neurologist who believes
he found a physiological substratum for Dawkin's memes, but his
name eludes me, and I don't know what became of his work. Anyway,
brain mapping is just in the first stages. We shall know immensly more
in 10 or 20 years.

Another buzz word to search on might be Embodied Construction Grammar.
This from (http://www.laakshmi.com/aarre/wiki/index.php/Image_schema):

Thanks for all the information.

"ECG: Embodied Construction Grammar. ECG uses a notation motivated by
brain studies and neural computation that can be used for
characterizing linguistic structures precisely. ECG elements reduce to
neural clusters and to circuitry that can do the appropriate
computation."

On the laakshmi wiki there are some other names mentioned which might
lead to something, e.g. Regier and Naryanan:

"The Cog Theory of image-schemas is vague, and necessarily so. It is
informed by what we have learned from Regier and Naryanan about the
kinds of neural structures that could carry out the necessary
computations. But it makes no claims about the exact neural circuits
that do the job, because not enough is known".

I don't know too much about it myself. From a theoretical point of view
I think the whole idea of looking for linguistic primitives is wrong,
whether they be cognitive primitives or "structural" primitives like
phonemes.

But if you want to know what has been done, Lakoff's neural theory of
language sounds like a good place to start.

-Rob

I shall have a lookt at some of his books.

Regards Franz Gnaedinger

.

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