Burghard B. Rieger/ Constantin Thiopoulos:
Semiotic Dynamics: A self-organizing lexical system in hypertext
In: Köhler, R./Rieger, B.B. (eds.): Contributions to Quantitative
Linguistics. Proceedings of The 1st Quantitative Linguistics Conference -
QUALICO-91, Dordrecht (Kluwer Academic Publishers) 1993, pp. 67-78
Abstract
Our understanding of the bunch of complex intellectual
activities subsumed under the notion of cognition is
still very limited, particularly in how knowledge is acquired
from texts and what processes are responsible for it. Recent
achievements in wordsemantics, conceptual structuring, and knowledge
representation within the intersection of cognitive psychology,
artificial intelligence and computational linguistics have shown
some agreement that cognition is (among others) responsible for, if not
identifiable with, the processes according to which for a cognitive system
previously unstructured surroundings may be tranformed to
its perceived environment whose identifiable portions and their relatedness
does not only constitute structures but also allow for their permanent
revision according to the system's capabilities. In following a semiotic
paradigm this inadequacy can
be overcome, hopefully allowing to avoid (if not to solve) a number
of spin-off problems, which originate in the traditional distinction
and/or the methodological separation of the meanings of languages'
terms from the way they are employed in discourse. It appears that failing to
mediate between these two sides of natural language semantics,
phenomena like creativity, dynamism, efficiency, vagueness,
and variability of meaning - to name only
the most salient - have fallen in between, stayed (or be kept) out of
the focus of interest, or were being overlooked altogether, sofar.
Moreover, there is some chance to bridge the gap between the formal
theories of language description (
competence) and the empirical analysis
of language usage (performance) that is increasingly felt to be
responsible for some unwarranted abstractions of fundamental properties
of natural languages.
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