TY - JOUR
T1 - Quantum field theory and the linguistic Minimalist Program
T2 - 8th International Workshop on Decoherence, Information, Complexity and Entropy, DICE 2016
AU - Piattelli-Palmarini, M.
AU - Vitiello, G.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Noam Chomsky for many illuminating discussions and suggestions. We are also thankful to the late Walter J. Freeman and Emilio Del Giudice for many insights. Very useful discussions with Gianfranco Basti are also acknowledged. Miur and INFN are acknowledged for partial financial support.
Publisher Copyright:
© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.
PY - 2017/8/21
Y1 - 2017/8/21
N2 - By resorting to recent results, we show that an isomorphism exist between linguistic features of the Minimalist Program and the quantum field theory formalism of condensed matter physics. Specific linguistic features which admit a representation in terms of the many-body algebraic formalism are the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of the Labeling Algorithm, the difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a sentence and the build-up of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation of sentence structures. The collective dynamical nature of the formation process of Logical Forms leading to the individuation of the manifold of concepts and the computational self-consistency of languages are also discussed.
AB - By resorting to recent results, we show that an isomorphism exist between linguistic features of the Minimalist Program and the quantum field theory formalism of condensed matter physics. Specific linguistic features which admit a representation in terms of the many-body algebraic formalism are the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of the Labeling Algorithm, the difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a sentence and the build-up of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation of sentence structures. The collective dynamical nature of the formation process of Logical Forms leading to the individuation of the manifold of concepts and the computational self-consistency of languages are also discussed.
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U2 - 10.1088/1742-6596/880/1/012016
DO - 10.1088/1742-6596/880/1/012016
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85028761371
VL - 880
JO - Journal of Physics: Conference Series
JF - Journal of Physics: Conference Series
SN - 1742-6588
IS - 1
M1 - 012016
Y2 - 12 September 2016 through 16 September 2016
ER -