Embodied Construction Grammar Approach to Compositionality and Conceptual Representation

The objective of this paper is to bring us a little bit closer to a general Neuro -Cognitive Theory of Cognition in Language and Thought that can account for the mechanics of language understanding, studied by the models of AI or connectionism, and the biology, explained by neurology and psychobiology. Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen et al. 2001) provides a formalism to show conceptual representation. Traditionally compositionality is considered a key feature of structured representational systems, be the case of the so called linguistic system. A system of representations is considered compositional because the semantic values of complex representations are determined by the semantic values of their parts. It is the aim of this paper to further the exchange of views on compositionality across disciplines and to explore the implications and condition of compositionality as a property of representational systems in the study of language, mind and brain.