Abstract: There is a long tradition associating language and other serial cognitive behavior with an underlying motor planning mechanism (Piaget 1936, Lashley 1951, Miller et al. 1960, passim). The evidence is evolutionary, neurophysiological, and developmental. It suggests that language is much more closely related to embodied cognition than current linguistic theories of grammar suggest.
I'll argue that practically every aspect of language reflects this connection transparently. Building on planning formalisms developed in Robotics and AI, with some attention to applicable machine learning techniques, two basic operation corresponding to seriation and affordance will be shown to provide the basis for both plan-composition in animals, and long-range dependency in human language, of the kind found in constructions like relative clauses and coordination.
A connection this direct raises a further obvious question: If language is so closely related to animal planning, why don't any other animals have language? I'll further argue that the specific requirements of human collaborative planning, involving actions like helping and promising that depend on an understanding of other minds that has been found to be lacking in other animals, provides a distinctively semantic precursor for recursive aspects distinguishing human language from animal communication. I'll show that the automaton that is minimally necessary to conduct search for collaborative plans, which is of only slightly greater generality than the push-down automaton, is exactly the automaton that also appears to characterize the parsing problem for natural languages.
Bio: Mark Steedman is a Professor of Cognitive Science in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, working in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, the communicative use of prosody, tense and aspect, and wide-coverage parsing using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). Prof. Steedman is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and the British Academy (FBA). He is a member of the Academy of Europe and a former President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).