John Bowers

In class two general principles of cognitive organization that regulate the process of pairing meaning representations with phonetic representations were discussed: (i) the Locus Principle; (ii) Generalized Pied-Piping. The first principle requires that once the process of satisfying the particular set of conditions associated with a specific word is initiated, all those conditions must be satisfied before the same process can be started with another word. The second principle requires that a word and all the words that it has syntactic relations with must be treated as a whole with respect to the linearization function. Do principles of cognitive organization similar to these show up in other areas of cognition? Or does it seem more likely that these principles are unique to the language faculty? More generally, are there other areas of cognition where cognitive relations that are unordered at one level of organization are systematically related to representations at another level that are linearly ordered? Or is this kind of cognitive oranization itself unique to the language faculty?