Grounding the Lexicon

Stevan Harnad

Abstract

Most dictionary entries name individuals and kinds of things, actions, states, or properties. The lexicon consists of the labels for these categories, and language allows as to combine and recombine them syntactically into propositions conveying information about still further, unlexicalized categories. But the source of the categories themselves is sensorimotor experience (plus any inborn adaptations of the brain). Hence it is the functional basis of our robotic capacities that grounds our linguistic capacities. There may be poverty of the stimulus insofar as learning the syntax is concerned (thereby requiring an inborn, unlearned, unlearnable Universal Grammar) but it is unlikely that there is poverty of the stimulus for the sensorimotor learning of most categories. Constraints on sensorimotor learning are more likely to come from the sensorimotor world itself, its content and its invariants, than from either neural dynamics or prior evolutionary adaptations.