Syntactic Computation and Semantic Merge
Syntactic Computation and Semantic Merge

Summary/Abstract: A formal model of syntactic operations is developed starting from recursive definitions and application of optimization principles. The result – a Fibonacci-like syntactic tree – is in fact an argument-based variant of the natural language syntax. An experiment designed to test this hypotheses confirmed that the argument-centered model is the key to mental operations. The semantic relations between the nouns’ concept-images in the conceptual nets influence the final result of syntactic computation. This work represents a further step in the formal description of the observed syntax-semantics dependences. The assumption is made that that the syntactic treatment includes a Merge operation between the images of the concepts. The obtained formal description of the stages of syntactic treatment corresponds to the experimental results.

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