SFB 991: The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition and Science

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The CRC 991 investigates the structure of representations in language, cognition, and science. It unites re-search in a broad range of areas in linguistics with philosophical projects and with research from neuroscience and from experimental psychology. The starting point is the hypothesis that there is a uniform structure of repre-sentations underlying the neural level, the cognitive level, the level of linguistic concepts and the level of institutionalized conceptions. This uniform structure is frames, where the CRC's notion of frames is inspired by the work of the cognitive psychologist L. W. Barsalou. Starting from this hypothesis, the CRC has so far addressed the following issues: the characteristics of different nominal concepts; the structure of event frames; frame (de)composition in morphologically complex words; frame-based representations of morphophonological paradigms; frame composition and its interface with morphosyntax, information structure and discourse; conceptual operations such as coercive shifts; ambiguity, vagueness, polysemy and idiomatic versus literal readings; corpus-based frame induction; grounding concepts in the sensory-motor system; fundamental issues in philosophy of science; frame based representations of prototypes; Bayesian category learning and frames; frames in the history of philosophy; and representation structures in the social cognition in rats.In the third phase, these topics will continue to play a role. Furthermore, the CRC will extend its research to the following aspects: a) frame-internal structures that distinguish different perspectives and different levels of abstraction, relevant for instance for constraints on modification, for coercion phenomena and for the relation between literal and figurative meaning; b) conceptual classification and ways to define frame types and hierarchical relations between them; c) empirical investigations of neural and cognitive correlates of frame structure and of the nature of cognitive representations reflected by social behavior in rats; d) unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches to corpus based frame induction; e) a unified theory of frame-based discourse processing.