Syntax of Testimony: Indexical Objects, Syntax, and Language or How to Tell a Story Without Words

Parsing spoken language without syntax

Parsing spontaneous speech is a difficult task because of the ungrammatical nature of most spoken utterances. To overpass this problem, we propose in this paper to handle the spoken language without considering syntax. We describe thus a microsemantic parser which is uniquely based on an associative network of semantic priming. Experimental results on spontaneous speech show that this parser st...

Story Diagrams – Syntax and Semantics

Learning Visually Grounded Words and Syntax of Natural Spoken Language

Properties of the physical world have shaped human evolutionary design and given rise to physically grounded mental representations. These grounded representations provide the foundation for higher level cognitive processes including language. Most natural language processing machines to date lack grounding. This paper advocates the creation of physically grounded language learning machines as ...

The Syntax and Semantics of Indexical Shifting in Modern Uyghur

All natural languages known so far have expressions referring to certain aspects of the context of utterance. In English, for example, the expression me refers to the speaker in the context of utterance,1 and does not have a fixed referent unlike proper names. More concretely, when you and I say me, this single word refers to two different individuals, whereas when we say Plato, we talk about t...

Syntax without Abstract Objects Nominalizing the Theory of Concatenation

Nominalists deny the existence of abstract objects. In view of the notoriously shadowy and intractable character of the latter, the formers’ thesis certainly has a strong initial appeal to anyone sharing even the least bit of a naturalistic bent. But even though many philosophers nowadays do exhibit this inclination, the vices and virtues of nominalism remain a live issue in contemporary debate...