Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax

How is the information we gather from the world through our sensory and motorapparatus converted into language? It is obvious that there is an interface between language andsensorimotor cognition because we can talk about what we see and do. In this book, Alistair Knottargues that this interface is more direct than commonly assumed. He proposes that the syntax of aconcrete sentence--a sentence that reports a direct sensorimotor experience--closely reflects thesensorimotor processes involved in the experience. In fact, he argues, the syntax of the sentencecan be interpreted as a description of these sensorimotor processes. Knott focuses on a simpleconcrete episode: a man grabbing a cup. He presents detailed models of the sensorimotor processesinvolved in experiencing this episode (drawing on research in psychology and neuroscience) and ofthe syntactic structure of the transitive sentence reporting the episode (drawing on ChomskyanMinimalist syntactic theory). He proposes that these two independently motivated models are closelylinked--that the logical form of the sentence can be given a detailed sensorimotor characterizationand that, more generally, many of the syntactic principles understood in Minimalism as encodinginnate linguistic knowledge are actually sensorimotor in origin. Knott's sensorimotorreinterpretation of Chomsky opens the way for a psychological account of sentence processing that iscompatible with a Chomskyan account of syntactic universals, suggesting a way to reconcile Chomsky'stheory of syntax with the empiricist models of language often viewed as Mimimalism'scompetitors.