Lamb is best known for his development of Relational Network Theory (RNT; formerly known as Stratificational Grammar), starting in the early 1960s. The key insight of RNT is that linguistic systems such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics are best described as networks of relationships rather than computational operations upon symbols (which is the view taken in many frameworks of formal linguistics, such as ChomskyanGenerative Grammar). Lamb developed a set of graphical formalisms, known as "abstract" and "narrow" relational network notation, for the analysis of linguistic networks based on the system network notation created by Michael Halliday for Systemic Functional Linguistics.[8]
Between the 1960s and 1990s, he further developed RNT by exploring its possible relationships to neurological structures and to thinking processes, especially the hypothesis that the nodes in his relational networks might correspond to cortical columns or minicolumns in the human neocortex. Halliday states that Lamb was aware of a possible correspondence between relational networks and neurological networks as early as 1963.[1] In 1999, he published Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language, a monograph expressing these ideas. Since then, Lamb's framework has also been referred to as Neurocognitive Linguistics (NCL).
His early work also developed the notion of "sememe" as a semantic object, analogous to the morpheme or phoneme in linguistics, and it was one of the inspirations for Roger Schank'sConceptual dependency theory, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the Artificial Intelligence movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Biography
Lamb's paternal great-grandfather immigrated from England to Illinois in the United States in the 19th century. Later, his grandfather, along with his grandmother and father (as a child), then moved from Illinois to Denver, Colorado in 1889. Lamb's mother's family arrived in Denver from Scotland in 1910. Sydney Lamb was born in Denver in 1929.[9]
By 1980, Lamb was in negotiations to sell his CAM design to another company, and he was invited to join the Department of Linguistics at Rice University by James E. Copeland.[13]
See also
"Linguistic and Cognitive Networks" in Cognition: A Multiple View (ed. Paul Garvin) New York: Spartan Books, 1970, pp. 195–222. Reprinted in Makkai and Lockwood, Readings in Stratificational Linguistics (1973), pp. 60–83.
References
^ abGarcía, Adolfo M.; Sullivan, William J.; Tsiang, Sarah (2017). An Introduction to Relational Network Theory. Sheffield: Equinox.
^Lamb, Sydney. "Sketch". Rice University. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
^Lockwood, David G.; Fries, Peter H.; Copeland, James E. (eds.). Functional Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition. John Benjamins.
^Makkai, Adam. "CV". Adam Makkai's website. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
^"PhD Alumni". Yale University, Department of Linguistics. Retrieved 16 May 2024.