Symbolist Paradigm of Language Structure

Abstract

Symbolism is one of the main research paradigms of cognitive psychology. It compares the human brain to a Turing Machine and argues that cognitive activity is a process using rules to conduct serial processing on symbols and output new symbolic expressions. Finiteness is the essential requirement of symbolism processor, including finite input, finite state, and finite transition rules. Among the elements of a language, phonemic system, grammatical rules and character system are all finite sets and they meet the requirements of symbolist paradigms; lexical-semantic system is a open set, and it has to be limited to adapt to the requirements at thecost of the detailed semantic meaning. Compared with the symbolist paradigm, connectionist paradigm is a more ideal cognitive and constructive model.