The affordance-based concept

Natural language use relies on situational context. The meaning of words and utterances depend on the physical environment and the goals and plans of communication partners. These facts should be central to theories of language and automatic language understanding systems. Instead, they are often ignored, leading to partial theories and systems that cannot fully interpret linguistic meaning. I introduce a new computational theory of conceptual structure that has as its core claim that concepts are neither internal nor external to the language user, but instead span the objective-subjective boundary. This theory proposes interaction and prediction as a central theme, rather than solely emphasizing deducing, sensing or acting. To capture the possible interactions between subject and object, the theory relies on the notion of perceived affordances: structured units of interaction that can be used for prediction at certain levels of abstraction. By using perceived affordances as a basis for language understanding, the theory accounts for many aspects of the situated nature of human language use. It provides a unified solution to a number of other demands on a theory of language understanding including conceptual combination, prototypicality effects, and the generative nature of lexical items.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Gorniak, Peter John

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deb K. Roy.

• Architecture. Program In Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33884
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33884

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33884