A Supervisory Control Approach for Execution Control of an FMC

This paper presents a generic methodology based on formal language theory for the modeling and control of flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) systems. The motivating idea behind the overall approach stems from the supervisory control theory under the framework of Ramadge and Wonham. Essentially, we characterize the asynchronous and dynamic behavior of an FMC as a regular language and formulate the control logic generation problem as a sublanguage calculation problem, which requires the resulting language to satisfy at least two properties: maximal permissiveness and controllability. Then an algorithm for resolving the problem is presented. Based on the solution of the problem called supervisor, we propose a controller architecture that guarantees coordinated operation of an FMC through the regulation of occurrences of events. An adaptive control policy that regenerates supervisors on changes in task configurations is presented and a dynamic equation that describes the evolution of the control logic along time is derived. Then, we show that the proposed maximally permissive adaptive control policy has a number of preferred properties, including computational efficiency and consistency between the successive supervisors. Finally, a controller for an example FMC is implemented, using the object-oriented software modules. Our procedure has the merit of mathematical soundness, modular design, and systematic implementation.     

Hallucinations psychiques verbales et langage intérieur dans la psychiatrie française I. De l’aliénation de la pensée à l’automatisme mental

The problem of verbal psychic hallucinations raises a host of clinical questions related to the epistemological problem of the link between inner language and thought. It will be shown how this problem evolved from the end of the XIXth century until the middle of the XXth century, by distinguishing various periods of the history of French psychiatry according to whether the pathogenic primacy of verbal hallucinations is attributed to an alienation of inner language or to an alienation of thought. During the first period, psychic verbal hallucinations are considered by J. Baillarger as the result of the alienation of thought which seems to reactualize, in an implicit way, the traditional theological discussion of the properties of language of the angels. During the second period, psychic verbal hallucinations will be conceived rather like the effect of the alienation of inner language. This period will include two subdivisions, according to whether the model of reference proves to be the neurological one of the aphasias, as adopted by G. Ballet or J. Séglas, or of the more general mecanicist doctrines such as G.G. de Clérambault’s mental automatism.     

Non-similarity combinatorial problems

Similarity problems intensively investigated in computational molecular biology have the following two stringology models: find the longest string included in any string of a given finite language, and find the shortest string including every string of a given finite language. These two problems are exemplified by the two well-known pairs of problems, the longest common subsequence (or substring) problem and the shortest common supersequence (or superstring) problem. interpretations.

In this paper we consider opposite problems connected with string non-inclusion relations: find the shortest string included in no string of a given finite language and find the longest string including no string of a given finite language. The predicate “string is not included in string β” is interpreted either as “ is not a subsequence of β” or as “ is not a substring of β”. The main purpose is to determine the complexity status of the non-similarity problems. Using graph approaches, we present NP-hardness proofs for the first interpretation and polynomial-time algorithms for the second one. Special cases of the problems, and related issues are discussed.     

Population behaviors and language maintenance--a case of the Korean-speaking community in China

With the regard to language maintenance, one of the most successful in over fifty of ethno-linguistic communities in China is the Korean community with more than two millions of Korean-speakers, in which there have been Regulations Regarding the Ethnic Language Use, and a maintenance-orientated and bilingual education system. However, language attrition comes to be occurring in the Korean community because more than two hundred thousands of Korean-speaking migrants have streamed from the Korean-rural community to the Chinese-urban community for the last twenty years. This paper, in urban-anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives, is aiming at an analysis of the cause of population moves and the urbanization process of the Korean community as well as their impact on the language maintenance and bilingual education in the Korean community. It is mainly divided into four sections, namely, (1) the situation of Korean-speaking community; (2) the problem of language maintenance; (3) the impact of Korean-speakers moves on language maintenance; (4) the impact of negative growth of population, and (5) the impact of uneven ratio of female population.     

Assortative mating and grandparental transmission facilitate the persistence of a sign language.

Conditions for the persistence (i.e., protection from loss) of a sign language are investigated assuming monogenic recessive inheritance of deafness, assortative mating for deafness or hearing, and cultural transmission of the sign language to deaf individuals from their deaf parents and deaf maternal grandparents. A new method is introduced to deal with the problem of grandparental transmission in which the basic variables are the frequencies of triplets comprising a mother, a father, and their daughter of permissible phenogenotypes. Usual stability analysis is then done on the system of linear recursions in the frequencies of these triplets, derived on the assumption that signers (users of the sign language) are rare. It is shown that assortative mating is the most important factor contributing to persistence, but that grandparental transmission can also have a significant effect when assortment is as strong as observed in England and the United States.     

Religion and Bioethics: Can We Talk?

Religious voices were important in the early days of the contemporary field of bioethics but have now become decidedly less prominent. This is unfortunate because religious elements are essential parts of the most foundational aspects of bioethics. The problem is that there is an incommensurability between religious language and languages of public discourse such as the “public reason” of John Rawls. To eliminate what is unique in religious language is to lose something essential. This paper examines the reasons for the marginalization of religion in bioethics, shows the limitations of Rawls’s notion of public reason, and argues for a more robust role for theology in articulating a new language for public discourse in bioethics.     

The evolutionary dynamics of grammar acquisition

Grammar is the computational system of language. It is a set of rules that specifies how to construct sentences out of words. Grammar is the basis of the unlimited expressibility of human language. Children acquire the grammar of their native language without formal education simply by hearing a number of sample sentences. Children could not solve this learning task if they did not have some pre-formed expectations. In other words, children have to evaluate the sample sentences and choose one grammar out of a limited set of candidate grammars. The restricted search space and the mechanism which allows to evaluate the sample sentences is called universal grammar. Universal grammar cannot be learned; it must be in place when the learning process starts. In this paper, we design a mathematical theory that places the problem of language acquisition into an evolutionary context. We formulate equations for the population dynamics of communication and grammar learning. We ask how accurate children have to learn the grammar of their parents' language for a population of individuals to evolve and maintain a coherent grammatical system. It turns out that there is a maximum error tolerance for which a predominant grammar is stable. We calculate the maximum size of the search space that is compatible with coherent communication in a population. Thus, we specify the conditions for the evolution of universal grammar.     

Your Morals Depend on Language

Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.     

Rank and relationships in the evolution of spoken language

If evolutionary benefits associated with language were predominantly referential, as many theorists assume, then there must have been a preparatory stage in which an 'appetite' for information, not evident in the other primates, developed. To date, no such stage has been demonstrated. The problem dissipates, however, if it is assumed that language emerged from a function more nearly shared with other primates. An obvious candidate is displaying. Here I argue that performative functions associated with oral sound-making provided initial pressures for vocal communication by promoting rank and relationships. These benefits, I suggest, facilitated conflict avoidance and resolution, collaboration, and reciprocal sharing of needed resources. By valuing the performative applications of language, which continue in modern humans, one can more easily derive speech from the social-vocal behaviours of non-human primates, providing greater continuity in accounts of linguistic evolution     

Internal and External Dynamics in Language: Evidence from Verb Regularity in a Historical Corpus of English

Human languages are rule governed, but almost invariably these rules have exceptions in the form of irregularities. Since rules in language are efficient and productive, the persistence of irregularity is an anomaly. How does irregularity linger in the face of internal (endogenous) and external (exogenous) pressures to conform to a rule? Here we address this problem by taking a detailed look at simple past tense verbs in the Corpus of Historical American English. The data show that the language is open, with many new verbs entering. At the same time, existing verbs might tend to regularize or irregularize as a consequence of internal dynamics, but overall, the amount of irregularity sustained by the language stays roughly constant over time. Despite continuous vocabulary growth, and presumably, an attendant increase in expressive power, there is no corresponding growth in irregularity. We analyze the set of irregulars, showing they may adhere to a set of minority rules, allowing for increased stability of irregularity over time. These findings contribute to the debate on how language systems become rule governed, and how and why they sustain exceptions to rules, providing insight into the interplay between the emergence and maintenance of rules and exceptions in language.     

Diachronic universals and morpheme order in the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future

This paper treats the problem of possible correlation between the current order of morphemes in a word and the order of syntactic elements from which they evolved at some point in the language history. A well-documented morpheme formation, the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future, is examined in the grammaticalization framework, and numerous attested examples from different stages of the change from imati ‘have’ to a future affix are presented. The history of this change clarifies the relation between a single case of grammaticalization and the syntactic structure of a language by showing that the position of the affix has never marked the typological category of the language.     

Bards,Poets, and Cliques: Frequency-Dependent Selection and the Evolution of Language Genes

The ability of humans to communicate via language is a complex, adapted phenotype, which undoubtedly has a recently evolved genetic component. However, the evolutionary dynamics of language-associated alleles are poorly understood. To improve our knowledge of such systems, a population-genetics model for language-associated genes is developed. (The model is general and applicable to social interactions other than communication.) When an allele arises that potentially improves the ability of individuals to communicate, it will experience positive frequency-dependent selection because its fitness will depend on how many other individuals communicate the same way. Consequently, new and rare alleles are selected against, posing a problem for the evolutionary origin of language. However, the model shows that if individuals form language-based cliques, then novel language-associated alleles can sweep through a population. Thus, the origin of language ability can be sufficiently explained by Darwinian processes operating on genetic diversity in a finite population of human ancestors.     

Detection of the dominant direction of information flow and feedback links in densely interconnected regulatory networks

Background  

Finding the dominant direction of flow of information in densely interconnected regulatory or signaling networks is required in many applications in computational biology and neuroscience. This is achieved by first identifying and removing links which close up feedback loops in the original network and hierarchically arranging nodes in the remaining network. In mathematical language this corresponds to a problem of making a graph acyclic by removing as few links as possible and thus altering the original graph in the least possible way. The exact solution of this problem requires enumeration of all cycles and combinations of removed links, which, as an NP-hard problem, is computationally prohibitive even for modest-size networks.     

Mirror brain systems, concepts and language: the price for anthropogenesis

The paper discusses the problem of cognitive evolution and the basis for the origin of language and mind, genetic history of Homo sapiens and whether the basic concepts are inborn or effected by experience, sensory or cognitive per se. The problem of localization of higher functions and Theory of Mind in norm and pathology is analyzed.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Homo loquens</Emphasis>: Evolution of cerebral functions and language

The paper reviews the state of the problem of evolution of language and brain. Various points of view are considered: nativism and connectionism, principle of modular organization of the higher psychic functions including language, and that of organization of all functions on the basis of the network and associative principle. There is also considered the justifiability of the idea of macromutation that has resulted in the appearance of language and a series of micromutations that have led to the same. Also considered are specific verbal disturbances including genetic ones.Translated from Zhurnal Evolyutsionnoi Biokhimii i Fiziologii, Vol. 40, No. 5, 2004, pp. 400–406.Original Russian Text Copyright © 2004 by Chernigovskaya.To the 100-Anniversary of N. N. Traugott     

Universal grammar and the Baldwin effect: a hypothesis and some philosophical consequences

Grammar is now widely regarded as a substantially biological phenomenon, yet the problem of language evolution remains a matter of controversy among Linguists, Cognitive Scientists, and Evolutionary Theorists alike. In this paper, I present a new theoretical argument for one particular hypothesis—that a “Language Acquisition Device” of the sort first posited by Noam Chomsky might have evolved via the so-called “Baldwin Effect”. Close attention to the workings of that mechanism, I argue, helps to explain a previously mysterious feature of the Language Acquisition Device—the sheer variety of languages it allows the child to learn—thereby revealing a far stronger case than adherents of the hypothesis have previously supposed. A further unheralded consequence of the hypothesis is a conceptual shift in the Chomskyan understanding of language, wherein the essentially public nature of language is freshly emphasised. This has the effect of bringing the Chomskyan view into closer accord with Saussurean accounts of language, as well as with recent trends in evolutionary theory.     

The sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis for language acquisition and language evolution

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine''s problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.     

Hallucinations psychiques verbales et langage intérieur dans la psychiatrie française II. Organo-dynamisme et psychanalyse

The problem of verbal psychic hallucinations raises a host of clinical questions related to the epistemological problem of the link between inner language and thought. In the first article (PSN, vol. 1, 2003, n^o 5, pp. 38–49) it was shown how this problem had evolved in psychiatry from the middle of the XIXth century to the middle of the XXth century, by distinguishing two historical periods. In the first period, dominated by the paradigm of mental alienation, the pathogenic primacy of verbal hallucinations had been attributed to an alienation of thought. And then, later, at the time of the paradigm of mental diseases, it was attributed to an alienation of the inner language according to mecanicist conceptions. In this second article, it will be shown how this inaugural opposition was transposed and transformed, at the beginning of second half of the XXth century, into two antagonistic points of view: one, defined asorgano-dynamic, of a primary alienation of meaning, developed by H. Ey in the same way from 1934 to 1973; and the other, diametrically opposed, which testifies in favour of the alienation of the subject to language, as supported by J. Lacan since 1946.     

Response by H. H. Pattee to Jon Umerez’s Paper: “Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?”

Umerez’s analysis made me aware of the fundamental differences in the culture of physics and molecular biology and the culture of semiotics from which the new field of biosemiotics arose. These cultures also view histories differently. Considering the evolutionary span and the many hierarchical levels of organization that their models must cover, models at different levels will require different observables and different meanings for common words, like symbol, interpretation, and language. These models as well as their histories should be viewed as complementary rather than competitive. The relation of genetic language and human language is the central issue. They are separated by 4 billion years and require entirely different models. Nevertheless, these languages have in common a unique unlimited expressive power that allows open-ended evolution and creative thought. Understanding the nature of this expressive power and how it arises remains a basic unsolved problem of biosemiotics.