Natural language is both a human creation and used only by humans. This suggests a strong connection between the traits of the language itself and the inner works of the human brain. It seems to me like that the structure of the brain is well optimized for the task and at the same time the structure of natural languages is optimized for the human brain. This, of course, hints at Chomsky’s universal grammar idea. However, it can also mean that structures that are ‘natural’ to humans might underlie the logical structure of languages.
Our way of thinking is motivated by objects. It’s this understanding that lead to the creation of object oriented programming in the early 1960s. Therefore, it’s somewhat natural to deduce that the underlying data structures used by the brain for language processing might also consist of object oriented representation of our world. This, of course, ignores the more immediate problem of parsing and decoding. However, I still believe this to be theoretically interesting. I wish to suggest a very rough draft for such a system.
Let’s have for every type of object in the world a ‘class’, which is essentially the data type of this object. This is very similar to Aristotelian ideas (universal forms). This will allow the mind to hold data types with attributes and methods for each object in the universe. In a way, it’s a high level object oriented programming language. Each class will have components, which are basically members of other classes. For verbs we will create VerbTypes, which will be methods. Such methods will require parameters like the predicate and various optional arguments. For each verb we will have a verb type and each class will implement all of them. Such an implementation in a class will basically show what happens when you commit this verb on an object of this class. We will also have AdjTypes for each type of adjective (color, taste, smell and etc.). Again, each class will have attributes for each AdjType and these can be initialized or not. Also, a class will extend higher level classes.
To summarize, a class will look something like this:
Class Apple extends Fruit {
// Methods of type VerbType:
eat();
throw();
burn();
…
// Attributes of type AdjType:
color = …
taste = …
smell = …
…
// All sort of components:
Seeds
Peel
…
}
When creating a real world situation, the subject creates an inner representation of the outside situation. Also, it’s possible, once the grammatical structure has been chosen, to populate a sentence with objects through the relations created by the methods and their arguments. Thus we can construct sentences describing the happenings inside the virtual representation of the reality inside our minds.
This is, of course, only a rough sketch and it only comes to outline an attempt to deal with the problem of inner representation of language and real life situations. Naturally, it is far from complete and neglects many critical problems.
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