Sydney MacDonald Lamb (born May 4, 1929 in

Denver Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of t ...

) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and professor at

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

, whose

stratificational grammar Stratificational Linguistics, also known as Neurocognitive Linguistics (NCL) or Relational Network Theory (RNT), is an approach to linguistics advocated by Sydney Lamb that suggests language usage and production to be stratificational in nature. It ...

is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's

transformational grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combin ...

. He has specialized in Neurocognitive Linguistics and a stratificational approach to language understanding. Lamb earned his Ph.D. from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1958 and taught there from 1956 to 1964. His dissertation was a grammar of the

Uto-Aztecan language Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

Mono Mono may refer to: Common meanings * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono * Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single Music Performers * Mono (Japanese b ...

, under the direction of

Mary Haas Mary Rosamond Haas (January 23, 1910 – May 17, 1996) was an American linguist who specialized in North American Indian languages, Thai, and historical linguistics. She served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. She was elected a ...

and Murray B. Emeneau.Lamb, Sydney. A Grammar of Mono. PhD. Dissertation. Berkeley, 1958.
/ref> In 1964, he began teaching at Yale University before joining the Semionics Associates in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

in 1977. Lamb did research in

North American Indian languages Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numb ...

specifically in those geographically centered on

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. His contributions have been wide-ranging, including those to

historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # ...

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, comput ...

, and the theory of linguistic structure. His work led to innovative designs of

content-addressable memory Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a special type of computer memory used in certain very-high-speed searching applications. It is also known as associative memory or associative storage and compares input search data against a table of stored d ...

hardware for

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PC ...

s. Lamb is best known as the father of the Relational Network Theory (RNT) of language, which is also known as

Stratificational Linguistics Stratificational Linguistics, also known as Neurocognitive Linguistics (NCL) or Relational Network Theory (RNT), is an approach to linguistics advocated by Sydney Lamb that suggests language usage and production to be stratificational in nature. It ...

. Near the turn of the millennium, he began developing the theory further and exploring its possible relationships to

neurological Neurology (from el, νεῦρον (neûron), "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the brain, the spinal ...

structures and to thinking processes. His early work developed the notion of "sememe" as a semantic object, analogous to the

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...

in linguistics; it was one of the inspirations of

Roger Schank Roger Carl Schank (born 1946) is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within the ...

Conceptual dependency theory Conceptual dependency theory is a model of natural language understanding used in artificial intelligence systems. Roger Schank at Stanford University introduced the model in 1969, in the early days of artificial intelligence. This model was extens ...

, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

movement of the 1960s/1970s. In 1999, his book —
Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language
' expressing some of these ideas — was published. See also: "Linguistic and Cognitive Networks" in Cognition: A Multiple View (ed. Paul Garvin) New York: Spartan Books, 1970, pp. 195–222. Reprinted in Makkai and Lockwood, Readings in Stratificational Linguistics (1973), pp. 60–83.

References

External links

Language and Brain: Neurocognitive Linguistics

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lamb, Sydney M. 1929 births Living people Linguists from the United States Rice University faculty University of California, Berkeley alumni Linguists of Uto-Aztecan languages