next up previous
Next: Philosophy. Up: COGNITIVE SCIENCE RESEARCH. Previous: Artificial Intelligence.

Linguistics.

Linguistics is another discipline that is arguably wholly subsumed by cognitive science (at least, to the extent that computationalism is de-emphasized). After all, language is often held to be the ``mirror of the mind''--the (physical) means for one mind to communicate its thoughts to another. But it was with the development of transformational grammar by Chomsky that cognitivism replaced behaviorism in linguistics. Subsequent work on a variety of computationally tractable ``successors'' to transformational grammar (e.g., lexical-functional grammar, generalized phrase-structure grammar) and other work in computational linguistics is clearly a part of cognitive science (cf. Winograd 1972, Allen 1987), as is work by such cognitive linguists as George Lakoff (e.g., his work on metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980) and on natural categories (Lakoff 1987)) and Leonard Talmy (e.g., his work on how language structures space, Talmy 1983).



William J. Rapaport
Fri Sep 6 15:53:47 EDT 1996