Timo Honkela: An intellectual obituary of Melissa Bowerman

Timo Honkela, Modeling Meaning and Knowledge, 15.2.2016

Timo Honkela

Modeling Meaning and Knowledge15 Feb 2016

[email protected]

An intellectual obituary of Melissa Bowerman


Timo Honkela

Modeling Meaning and Knowledge15 Feb 2016

[email protected]

An intellectual obituary of Melissa Bowerman

(1942-2011)


In 2005, I learned to know Melissa Bowerman's workthrough her presentationin a cognitive science

workshop in Lund organized by

Peter Gärdenfors


Interdisciplinary, theoretical, empirical

● “Bowerman was always interdisciplinary in her work: she drew on findings from developmental psychology, cognitive and linguistic anthropology, and linguistics.

● She was a pioneer in the use of experimental and ethnographic data, across a range of languages,

● as she examined how language shapes both cognitive and linguistic development in the young child, and

● how different languages subtly influence adult categorization of such spatial relations as containment and support.”

http://www.mpi.nl/people/bowerman-melissa/obituary


Complexities of translation

● The early attempts to develop machine translation were based on the idea of using dictionaries to facilitate word-to-word translation

● Developers encountered problems at multiple levels including syntactic and semantic ones

● Languages have different word orders● Languages divide conceptual spaces in

different was


Melissa Bowerman

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Space under Construction

Language-Specific Spatial Categorization

In First Language Acquisition

Excerpts, presentation in 2005Lund University Cognitive Science


- From the 1970s on, prevailing view has been that spatial words (and other words) are linked to concepts that the learner has already established on the basis of nonlinguistic cognitive development.

E.g., for prepositions:

IN, OUT – containment

ON, OFF – support

UP, DOWN – vertical motion

Cognitive priority hypothesis:

Excerpts, presentation in 2005Lund University Cognitive Science


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

UC Berkeley, 2006 (?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition


Example 1:

Putting on clothing

Excerpts, Bowerman's presentation in 2005Lund University Cognitive Science


SINTA

IPTA

SSUTA

ENGLISH

PUT ON

KOREAN

(Choi &Bowerman1991)


SINTA

IPTA

SSUTA

KIRU

HAKU

KABURU

KOREAN JAPANESE

(Kameyama 1983,

Schaefer 1986)

(Choi &Bowerman1991)


YORUBA(Niger-Congo)

TSWANA(Bantu)

(Schaefer 1986)

DÈ

(Put clothing on extremities:

head, feet) arms/

hands)

GÒRWÁLÀ

GÒÀPÀRÀ

WO


Example 2:

Carrying something

Excerpts, Bowerman's presentation in 2005Lund University Cognitive Science


ENGLISH

CARRY


NAVAHO

LIVING

BULKY

LONG

CONTAINER WITH CONTENTS


TZELTALMAYAN

ON HEAD

IN ARMSON BACK

ON SHOULDER

IN HAND,

SUPPORT FROM ABOVE


Concepts of the world

● Conceptual systems of different languages divide the conceptual space in different ways

● Quine even suggested that translation is not possible

● It makes more sense to consider the questionin relative rather than in absolute terms

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/


Crosslingual mapping of wordsin a conceptual space

Honkela, Virpioja & Väyrynen 2008Adaptive translation: Finding interlingual mappings using self-organizing maps


http://cogsys.blogspot.fi/2007/02/ andrew-chesterman-translation.html

Andrew Chesterman

lists more than 20 specific translation strategies thathe divided generally intosyntactic, semantic andpragmatic strategies

Timo Honkela: An intellectual obituary of Melissa Bowerman

Education

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