Jerry Feldman’s paper is to be welcomed in seeking to link linguistic compositional semantics to some form of nonlinguistic conceptual composition. In fact, I’d like to press the question, and ask why concepts are compositional, and what it is that allows human conceptual compositionality to support human language, while animal conceptual compositionality apparently does not. First I’d like to ...

What is functionalism? Both Silverstein (1987) and Nichols (1984) have analyzed in detail the variety of ways functionalism has been used by linguists. Silverstein made a division into four types of functions, referential and pragmatic: (a) `sense-structure', (b) the `abstract, "sentence"-internal distribution of forms,' (c) the `use of signal forms for purposive, intentional social effect' (d)...

Purpose: The TONI-3 is a norm-referenced nonlinguistic problem solving ability assessment tool used: • with individuals who have severe spoken language disorders (i.e. aphasia); • with individuals who are deaf or hearing impaired; • with non-English speakers, or English-language learners; • to assess cognitive, language, or motor impairments due to neurological • conditions (i.e. cerebral palsy...

Speech is not a purely auditory signal. From around 2 months of age, infants are able to correctly match the vowel they hear with the appropriate articulating face. However, there is no behavioral evidence of integrated audiovisual perception until 4 months of age, at the earliest, when an illusory percept can be created by the fusion of the auditory stimulus and of the facial cues (McGurk effe...

We present the first extension of the DataOriented Parsing paradigm (Bod 1998a) to Natural Language Generation: Unmediated Data-Oriented Generation, or UDOG. It is “unmediated” because instead of using a logic-like amodal representation of meaning as a basis for semantics (Van den Berg et al 1994), it exploits direct connections between exemplars in linguistic and nonlinguistic (in this case vi...

Plainly, this judgment was prompted by the absence of agreement between the question's subject and verb. Efforts i s plural and 'requires the plural are, not the singular is. Belying its reputation as an effete detail, agreement i s a paradigm case ofwhat syntax does. Fundamentally, syntax ties together words that rep resent elements of nonlinguistic thought. The following example illustrates h...

Much recent research has addressed the question of cerebral asymmetry in the perception of American Sign Language (Ameslan). The question has, of course, been prompted by the traditional characterization of the left hemisphere as specialized for language and the right for visuospatial or nonlinguistic functions. Since Ameslan carries a complexity and regularity analogous to that of spoken langu...