Semiotics and Computational Linguistics On Semiotic Cognitive Information Processing

Signs, which are the domain of inquiry in semiotics, have a complex ontology. Apart from being used-adequate knowledge provided-by communicators, and recognized as being decomposable into smaller elements and aggregatable to larger structures, they are also meant to be understood. This is a consequence of their manifold identity as compound physical objects with real world extensions in space-time-locations and as activators for complex mental processes which tend to be identified with some mind and/or brain activities responsible for their understanding. In the cognitive sciences all processes of perception, identification, and interpretation of (external) structures are considered information processing which (natural or artificial) systems-due to their own (internal) structuredness or knowledge-are able (or unable) to perform. Combining the semiotic with the cognitive paradigm in computational linguistics, the processes believed to constitute natural language sign structures and their understand­ ing is modeled by way of procedural, i.e. computational (re-)constructions of such processes that produce structures comparable to those that the understanding of (very large) samples of situated natural language discourse would imply. Thus, computa­ tional semiotic models in cognitive linguistics aim at simulating the constitution of meanings and the interpretation of signs without their predicative and propositional representations which dominate traditional research formats in syntax and semantics so far. This is achieved by analyzing the linear or syntagmatic and selective or paradig­ matic constraints which natural languages impose recursively on the formation and structure of (strings of) linguistic entities on different levels of systemic distinction. It will be argued (and illustrated) that fuzzy modeling allows to derive more adequate representational means whose (numerical) specificity and (procedural) definiteness may complement formats of categorial type precision (which would appear phenomenolog­ ically incompatible) and processual determinateness (which would seem cognitively inadequate). Several examples from fuzzy linguistic research will be given to illustrate these points.