Sydney Lamb
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Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist.[1] He is the Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rice University.[2] Lamb is best known for his development of the theory of Stratificational Grammar starting in the early 1960s. The key insight of early Stratificational Grammar was that linguistic systems such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics were 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 Chomskyan Generative Grammar). Lamb developed a graphical formalism for the analysis of linguistic networks based on the system network notation created by Michael Halliday for Systemic Functional Linguistics.[3]
In the 1990s, he further developed Stratificational Grammar 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 in the human neocortex. In 1999, he published Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language, a monograph expressing some of these ideas. Since then, Lamb's framework has been more commonly known as "Relational Network Theory" (RNT) or "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's Conceptual dependency theory, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the Artificial Intelligence movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Biography[edit]
Lamb earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958 and taught there from 1956 to 1964.[1] His dissertation was a grammar of the Uto-Aztecan language Mono, under the direction of Mary Haas and Murray B. Emeneau.[4] In 1964, he began teaching at Yale University before joining the Semionics Associates in Berkeley, California in 1977.[1] Lamb did research in North American Indian languages specifically in those geographically centered on California. His contributions have been wide-ranging, including those to historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and the theory of linguistic structure. His work led to innovative designs of content-addressable memory hardware for microcomputers.
See also[edit]
"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[edit]
- ^ a b c Lamb, Sydney M. "Encyclopædia Britannica". Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Retrieved 2010-12-09.
- ^ "Sydney M Lamb (Rice University)". Retrieved 2024-04-20.
- ^ Lamb, Sydney M. Systemic networks, relational networks and choice. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2024-04-20.
- ^ Lamb, Sydney. A Grammar of Mono. PhD. Dissertation. Berkeley, 1958.
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