Sydney Lamb

Sydney Lamb
Born
Sydney MacDonald Lamb

(1929-05-04) May 4, 1929 (age 95)
Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Known forRelational Network Theory
Parents
  • Sydney Bishop Lamb (father)
  • Jean MacDonald (mother)
Academic background
Education
ThesisMono Grammar (1957)
Doctoral advisorMary Haas
InfluencesFerdinand de Saussure, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev, Charles Hockett, H.A. Gleason Jr., Michael Halliday, Vernon Mountcastle[1]
Academic work
DisciplineLinguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience
Institutions
Doctoral studentsAdam Makkai, William J. Sullivan, William M. Christie Jr.[3][4][5]
Websitewww.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/sketch.htm

Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist.[6] He is the Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rice University.[7] His scientific contributions have been wide-ranging, including those to historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and the theory of linguistic structure.

Lamb is best known for his development of Relational Network Theory (RNT; formerly known as Stratificational Grammar), starting in the early 1960s. The key insight of RNT is that linguistic systems such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics are 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 set of graphical formalisms, known as "abstract" and "narrow" relational network notation, for the analysis of linguistic networks based on the system network notation created by Michael Halliday for Systemic Functional Linguistics.[8]

Between the 1960s and 1990s, he further developed RNT 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 or minicolumns in the human neocortex. Halliday states that Lamb was aware of a possible correspondence between relational networks and neurological networks as early as 1963.[1] In 1999, he published Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language, a monograph expressing these ideas. Since then, Lamb's framework has also been referred to as 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.

  1. ^ a b García, Adolfo M.; Sullivan, William J.; Tsiang, Sarah (2017). An Introduction to Relational Network Theory. Sheffield: Equinox.
  2. ^ Lamb, Sydney. "Sketch". Rice University. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  3. ^ Lockwood, David G.; Fries, Peter H.; Copeland, James E. (eds.). Functional Approaches to Language, Culture, and Cognition. John Benjamins.
  4. ^ Makkai, Adam. "CV". Adam Makkai's website. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  5. ^ "PhD Alumni". Yale University, Department of Linguistics. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  6. ^ Lamb, Sydney M. "Encyclopædia Britannica". Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Retrieved 2010-12-09.
  7. ^ "Sydney M Lamb (Rice University)". Retrieved 2024-04-20.
  8. ^ Lamb, Sydney M. "Systemic networks, relational networks and choice". In Fontaine, Lise; Bartlett, Tom; O'Grady, Gerard (eds.). Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring Choice. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 2024-04-20.