Pathways of the Brain: The neurocognitive basis of language

by Sydney M. Lamb

The brain is the organ of knowledge and organizer of our abilities, our means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about anything we experience or imagine, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. How does it manage all this? Does it represent information in symbols or in the connectivity of a vast network? Pathways of the Brain builds a theory to answer such questions. Using a top-down modeling strategy, it charts relationships among words and other products of the brain’s linguistic system to reveal properties of that system. Going beyond earlier linguistics, it sets three plausibility requirements for a valid neurocognitive operational, developmental, and It must show how the linguistic system can operate for speaking and understanding, how it can be learned by children, and how it is implemented in neural structures. Unlike theories that leave linguistics isolated from science, it builds a bridge to biology.
Of interest to anthropologists, linguists, neurologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and any thoughtful person interested in language or the brain.
The author is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences .

Genres: Linguistics

428 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Sydney MacDonald Lamb is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar. He has specialized in Neurocognitive Linguistics and a stratificational approach to language understanding.

Lamb earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and taught there from 1956 to 1964. His dissertation was a grammar of the Uto-Aztecan language Mono, under the direction of Mary Haas and Murray B. Emeneau. In 1964, he began teaching at Yale University before joining the Semionics Associates in Berkeley, California in 1977. Lamb did research in North American Indian languages specifically in those geographically centered o♙California. His contributions have been wide-ranging, including those to historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and the theory of linguistic structure. His work led to innovative designs of content-addressable memory hardware for microcomputers.

Lamb is best known as the father of the relational network theory of language, which is also known as "stratificational theory". Near the turn of the millennium, he began developing the theory further and exploring its possible relationships to neurological structures and to thinking processes. His early work developed the notion of "sememe" as a semantic object, analogous to the morpheme or phoneme in linguistics; it was one of the inspirations of Roger Schank's Conceptual dependency theory, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the Artificial Intelligence movement of the 1960s/1970s.