Sydney Lamb

Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in Denver, Colorado) is an American linguist. He is the Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rice University. Lamb is best known for his development of the theory of Stratificational Grammar starting in the early 1960s. The key insight of early Stratificational Grammar was that linguistic systems such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics were 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 graphical formalism for the analysis of linguistic networks based on the system network notation created by Michael Halliday for Systemic Functional Linguistics.

In the 1990s, he further developed Stratificational Grammar 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 in the human neocortex. In 1999, he published ''[http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/pb.htm Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language]'', a monograph expressing some of these ideas. Since then, Lamb's framework has been more commonly known as "Relational Network Theory" (RNT) or "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. Provided by Wikipedia