
Relational Network Theory (RNT), also known as Neurocognitive Linguistics (NCL) and formerly as Stratificational Linguistics or Cognitive-Stratificational Linguistics, is a
connectionist
Connectionism is an approach to the study of human mental processes and cognition that utilizes mathematical models known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks.
Connectionism has had many "waves" since its beginnings. The first ...
theoretical framework in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
primarily developed by
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. His scientific contributions have been wide-ranging, including thos ...
which aims to integrate
theoretical linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics that, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to the theory of language, or the branch of linguistics that inquires into the ...
with
neuroanatomy
Neuroanatomy is the study of the structure and organization of the nervous system. In contrast to animals with radial symmetry, whose nervous system consists of a distributed network of cells, animals with bilateral symmetry have segregated, defi ...
. It views the linguistic system of individual speakers, responsible for language comprehension and production, as consisting of networks of relationships which interconnect across different "strata" (or "levels") of language. These relational networks are hypothesized to correspond to neural maps of
cortical columns or
minicolumns in the
human brain
The human brain is the central organ (anatomy), organ of the nervous system, and with the spinal cord, comprises the central nervous system. It consists of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum. The brain controls most of the activi ...
.
Consequently, RNT is related to the wider family of
cognitive linguistic theories. Furthermore, as a
functionalist approach to linguistics, RNT shares a close relationship with
Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).
History
The origins of Relational Network Theory date to 1957, when Sydney Lamb completed his PhD dissertation on the
Uto-Aztecan language
The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ...
Mono. Contrary to prevailing
structuralist
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns tha ...
methods at the time, which stipulated discovery procedures assuming two levels of structure (morphology and phonology), Lamb's dissertation argued that Mono was better described with four strata: the morphemic, allomorphic, morphophonemic, and phonemic. The relationships between the strata were postulated to be
realizational, so that morphemes were realized by allomorphs, allomorphs realized by morphophonemes, and morphophonemes by phonemes. He later extended this argument to
English in 1958 in a presentation to the
Berkeley
Berkeley most often refers to:
*Berkeley, California, a city in the United States
**University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California
*George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher
Berkeley may also refer to ...
Linguistics Group.
At this stage, Lamb regarded the main innovative insight of his new framework to be the multi-stratified structure of language, hence why "Stratificational Grammar" was initially chosen as the framework's name.
The strata concept continued to be developed by Lamb under the influence of
Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics
In linguistics, glossematics is a structuralist theory proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Hans Jørgen Uldall. It defines the ''glosseme'' as the most basic unit of language.
Hjelmslev and Uldall eventually went separate ways with their respecti ...
, namely as an extension of Hjelmslev's notion of the
linguistic sign
In semiotics, a sign is anything that communicates a meaning that is not the sign itself to the interpreter of the sign. The meaning can be intentional, as when a word is uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, as when a symptom is t ...
as having an "expression plane" and a "content plane".
In fall 1964, inspired by a passage from Hjelmslev's ''Prolegomena to a Theory of Language'', Lamb developed the insight that realizational relationships between units of different strata constituted a network, and that the units themselves were nothing but points in the network defined solely by realizational relations with other points.
Also in 1964, Lamb encountered
Michael Halliday's system network notation from
Systemic Functional Linguistics
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system.
It was devised by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from J. R. Firth, his ...
for the first time. Building on the network insight from Hjelmslev, Lamb made three adaptations to Halliday's notation to create relational network notation: (1) a 90 degrees clockwise rotation of the diagrams, (2) the use of a triangle instead of curly brackets to represent conjunctive 'AND' nodes, and (3) the introduction of ordered realization.
The first public presentation of the relational network notation was given a year later in 1965, in a lecture delivered by Lamb at the Linguistic Institute of the
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...
. Other linguists in attendance at that lecture included
Ronald Langacker
Ronald Wayne Langacker (born December 27, 1942) is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of cognitive ...
, Ruth Brend, and Lamb's students David G. Lockwood and Peter A. Reich.
It was also in 1965 that Reich first pointed out to Lamb that his relational networks seemed strikingly similar to neurological networks,
though Halliday states that Lamb was already aware of the possibility of relating linguistic theory to actual neural processes as early as 1963.
Overview
RNT suggests that the linguistic system may be analyzed according to separate 'strata', or levels. The strata are ordered hierarchically and, whilst there are no clear-cut boundaries between strata, the elements of each stratum share similar characteristics. For example, a lexical item in the
lexicogrammatical stratum is typically a specific sequence of phonemes which connects one or more lexical meanings in the semantic stratum. Several strata are involved in the production of a sound from an initial idea. In linguistic production, each stratum provides actualization or realization for the next lower stratum. Thus, speaking a word would involve a realizational pathway from the semantic stratum to the lexicogrammar, then the phonology, and then the phonetics. The reverse direction is true for linguistic perception and comprehension.
Some commonly posited stratificational units and their strata include:
*The
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
as the unit on the
phonemic
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
stratum.
*The
lexeme
A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms ta ...
as the unit on the
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lexical ...
or
lexicogrammatical stratum.
*The
morpheme
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...
as the unit on the
morphemic stratum.
*The
sememe
A sememe (; ) is a semantic language unit of meaning, analogous to a morpheme. The concept is relevant in structural semiotics.
A seme is a proposed unit of transmitted or intended meaning; it is atomic or indivisible. A sememe can be the meaning ...
as the unit on the
semantic
Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
stratum.
In contrast to
generativist approaches to linguistics, Stratificational Linguistics does not support the notion of an autonomous stratum for syntax. Instead, the term '
lexicogrammar Lexicogrammar is a term directly related to systemic functional linguistics. Systemic functional linguistics is a specific approach to adding as much detail as possible when describing lexicogrammar. Michael Halliday, the father of systemic function ...
', borrowed from Systemic Functional Linguistics, is preferred because Stratificational Linguistics suggests that syntactic categories are merely labels for classifying different types of lexemes but do not actually play any role in the realization of the lexemes.
Rather, it is posited that what is traditionally called 'syntax' is simply the result of what orderings or sequences of lexemes are possible in the lexicogrammatical system of an individual person. In other words, there is no need to posit a separate stratum for syntax to account for syntactic phenomena. It has been further suggested that each lexeme has its own syntactic pattern which determines how it combines with other lexemes, a stance shared with
Construction Grammar
Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...
.

Linguistic units in RNT are conceptualised as relational networks. Simply put, a linguistic unit at any stratum is defined in relation to other units. For example, the phonemic sequence /bɔɪ/ may be analyzed as a network node which is activated when the nodes for /b/, /ɔ/ and /ɪ/ are also activated. Similarly, the node for the sequence /t
hɔɪ/ gets activated when /t
h/, /ɔ/ and /ɪ/ are also activated. The two sequences /bɔɪ/ and /t
hɔɪ/ are defined in relation to the set of phoneme nodes /t
h/, /b/, /ɔ/ and /ɪ/, and their relationships can be graphed as a relational network diagram.
Further reading
* Bennett, David C. 1968. English Prepositions: A Stratificational Approach. ''Journal of Linguistics'' 4.2:153-172.
* Lamb, Sydney M. "The Sememic Approach to Structural Semantics 1." ''American Anthropologist'' 66, no. 3 (1964): 57-78.
* Lamb, Sydney M. ''Pathways of the brain: The neurocognitive basis of language''. John Benjamins, 1999.
* Lamb, Sydney M. ''Language and reality: Selected writings of Sydney Lamb''. Continuum, 2004.
* Lockwood, David G. 1969. Markedness in Stratificational Phonology. ''Language'' 45.2:300-308.
* White, John. 1969. Stratificational Grammar: A New Theory of Language. ''College Composition and Communication'' 20.3:191-197.
References
{{Reflist
External links
LangBrain website
See also
*
Meaning–text theory
Meaning–text theory (MTT) is a theoretical linguistics, theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel'čuk, Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of models of natural language. The theory pro ...
*
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of Nervous system, neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fie ...
*
Systemic Functional Linguistics
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is an approach to linguistics, among functional linguistics, that considers language as a social semiotic system.
It was devised by Michael Halliday, who took the notion of system from J. R. Firth, his ...
*
Construction Grammar
Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...
*
Word Grammar Word Grammar is a theory of linguistics, developed by Richard Hudson since the 1980s. It started as a model of syntax, whose most distinctive characteristic is its use of dependency grammar, an approach to syntax in which the sentence's structure i ...
*
Stratification
Linguistics
Theories of language
Grammar frameworks
Cognitive linguistics