The specifier–head relationship: negation and French subject proforms

This article1 and the three others in this thematic collection are about heads and specifiers, the relationship between them, and how this relationship can change over time. A theme which emerges is the notion that the spec(ifier)–head relationship is cyclic, in other words, the synchronic relationship between the head and its specifier within a given phrase in a given language can be characterised as a location at a particular point on a cycle, while the diachronic development of the relationship can be seen as a directional stepwise shift around that cycle. The article is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces the theoretical framework. Section 3.1 sketches a well-known diachronic phenomenon – the history of sentential negation – which readily lends itself to an analysis in terms of a cyclic spec–head relationship, and shows how the stages in the cycle have been characterised theoretically. Section 3.2 considers another set of data − pre- and postverbal subject proforms in French − which is similarly suitable for such an approach. Section 4, finally, introduces the three other contributions to the collection

When speech is ambiguous, gesture steps in: Sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic principles in early childhood

10.1017/S0142716409990221Applied Psycholinguistics311209-22

More things than are dreamt of in your biology: information processing in biologically-inspired robots

Animals and robots perceiving and acting in a world require an ontology that accommodates entities, processes, states of affairs, etc., in their environment. If the perceived environment includes information-processing systems, the ontology should reflect that. Scientists studying such systems need an ontology that includes the first-order ontology characterising physical phenomena, the second-order ontology characterising perceivers of physical phenomena, and a (recursive) third order ontology characterising perceivers of perceivers, including introspectors. We argue that second- and third-order ontologies refer to contents of virtual machines and examine requirements for scientific investigation of combined virtual and physical machines, such as animals and robots. We show how the CogAff architecture schema, combining reactive, deliberative, and meta-management categories, provides a first draft schematic third-order ontology for describing a wide range of natural and artificial agents. Many previously proposed architectures use only a subset of CogAff, including subsumption architectures, contention-scheduling systems, architectures with ‘executive functions’ and a variety of types of ‘Omega’ architectures. Adding a multiply-connected, fast-acting ‘alarm’ mechanism within the CogAff framework accounts for several varieties of emotions. H-CogAff, a special case of CogAff, is postulated as a minimal architecture specification for a human-like system. We illustrate use of the CogAff schema in comparing H-CogAff with Clarion, a well known architecture. One implication is that reliance on concepts tied to observation and experiment can harmfully restrict explanatory theorising, since what an information processor is doing cannot, in general, be determined by using the standard observational techniques of the physical sciences or laboratory experiments. Like theoretical physics, cognitive science needs to be highly speculative to make progress

Principles of structure building in music, language and animal song

M.R. was generously supported by the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy as well as the Zukunftskonzept at TU Dresden supported by the Exzellenzinitiative of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. W.Z. is supported by the New Generation Initiative of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. G.A.W. is supported by the Lrn2Cre8 and ConCreTe projects, which acknowledge the financial support of the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme within the Seventh Framework Programme for Research of the European Commission, under FET grant numbers 610859 and 611733. C.S. acknowledges funding from the Excellence Clusters Languages of Emotions and Neurocure, the collaborative research grant SFB 665, and Bernstein focus area ‘neural basis of learning’, project ‘variable tunes: neural mechanisms underlying learning motor sequences (01GQ0961/TP1, BMBF)