Embodied Metarepresentations

Nicolás Hinrichs; Maryam Foradi; Tariq Yousef; Elisa Hartmann; Susanne Triesch; Jan Kaßel; Johannes Pein

doi:10.3389/fnbot.2022.836799

Embodied Metarepresentations

Front Neurorobot. 2022 Apr 28:16:836799. doi: 10.3389/fnbot.2022.836799. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Nicolás Hinrichs¹, Maryam Foradi¹, Tariq Yousef², Elisa Hartmann³, Susanne Triesch^{4

5}, Jan Kaßel⁶, Johannes Pein⁷

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Philology, Institute for Applied Linguistics and Translatology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.
² Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
³ Chair of Software Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science, Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany.
⁴ Department of Scandinavian and Finnish Studies, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.
⁵ Department of German Linguistics, German Studies, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
⁶ Institute of Indology and Central Asian Studies, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
⁷ Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany.

Abstract

Meaning has been established pervasively as a central concept throughout disciplines that were involved in cognitive revolution. Its metaphoric usage comes to be, first and foremost, through the interpreter's constraint: representational relationships and contents are considered to be in the "eye" or mind of the observer and shared properties among observers themselves are knowable through interlinguistic phenomena, such as translation. Despite the instability of meaning in relation to its underdetermination by reference, it can be a tertium comparationis or "third comparator" for extended human cognition if gauged through invariants that exist in transfer processes such as translation, as all languages and cultures are rooted in pan-human experience and, thus, share and express species-specific ontology. Meaning, seen as a cognitive competence, does not stop outside of the body but extends, depends, and partners with other agents and the environment. A novel approach for exploring the transfer properties of some constituent items of the original natural semantic metalanguage in English, that is, semantic primitives, is presented: FrameNet's semantic frames, evoked by the primes SEE and FEEL, were extracted from EuroParl, a parallel corpus that allows for the automatic word alignment of items with their synonyms. Large Ontology Multilingual Extraction was used. Afterward, following the Semantic Mirrors Method, a procedure that consists back-translating into source language, a translatological examination of translated and original versions of items was performed. A fully automated pipeline was designed and tested, with the purpose of exploring associated frame shifts and, thus, beginning a research agenda on their alleged universality as linguistic features of translation, which will be complemented with and contrasted against further massive feedback through a citizen science approach, as well as cognitive and neurophysiological examinations. Additionally, an embodied account of frame semantics is proposed.

Keywords: 4EA cognition; FrameNet; frame semantics; natural language processing (NLP); natural semantic metalanguage (NSM); semantic frame parsing; semantic mirroring; translation universals.