No Language without Reason—No Reason without Language

Language without communication intention

This paper argues that a language can exist and flourish in a community even if none of of the members of the community has any communication intentions; and that reference to the notion of communication intention can therefore be dispensed with in the core account of the nature oflinguistic meaning. Certainly one cannot elucidate the notion of linguistic meaning without reference to psychologi...

Language: Life without Numbers

If your language did not have words for numbers, would you be able to think about numeric quantities? An Amazonian culture where number words are limited to one, two and many has provided new insights to the interaction between thought and language.

Thought Without Language

Parsing spoken language without syntax

Parsing spontaneous speech is a difficult task because of the ungrammatical nature of most spoken utterances. To overpass this problem, we propose in this paper to handle the spoken language without considering syntax. We describe thus a microsemantic parser which is uniquely based on an associative network of semantic priming. Experimental results on spontaneous speech show that this parser st...

Matching Objects Without Language Extension

Pattern matching is a powerful programming concept which has proven its merits in declarative programming. The absence of pattern-matching in object-oriented programming languages is felt especially when tackling source code processing problems. But existing proposals for pattern matching in such languages rely on language extension, which makes their adoption overly intrusive. We propose an ap...