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In full collaboration with the Laboratory of Text Structure and Linguistic Information, the Laboratory of Linguistic Information aims at elucidating the nature of the language faculty that enables us to use natural languages. The language faculty includes a huge amount of unconscious knowledge about the sound and meaning of words and sentence structures. We have to clarify (i) when and how it occurred in our brain and (ii) what the relation between the language faculty and the nonlinguistic cognitive systems is like. Among the theories tackling these general questions, we will mainly devote ourselves to the following fields:
(1) Syntax
Exploration of the nature of the innate and universal linguistic competence and the properties of individual languages and of their relation to the extra-linguistic cognitive systems, through the theoretical and empirical investigation of the syntactic structure of natural language and the comparison of typologically distinct languages.
(2) Formal Semantics
Explication of the mechanisms of semantic interpretation, the forms of semantic representations, and their correspondence to conceptual structures, through the theoretical and empirical investigation of the relation between syntactic and semantic structures.
(3) Relations with Other Cognitive Systems
Inquiry into the relation between language faculty as a biological subsystem and other cognitive systems relevant to vision, thought, context recognition, and emotion.
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