Semantic structures within natural language and their cognitive functions

Abstract: Natural language is considered closely intertwined with human cognition, with linguistic structures posited to offer profound insights into the cognitive system. However, as a coding system, natural language encodes diverse objects into unified forms; its prominent formal features capture people’s attention, such as lexical combinatorial rules, which tend to overshadow those form-independent structures. Here, I present knowledge-level, logic-level, task-level, and model-level semantic structures inherent in natural language. These structures are discovered by shifting the research focus from coding forms of natural language to the objects they encode, unveiling different semantic layers integrated within sentences. The cognitive functions of these structures are evident both in themselves and in models developed from them. I therefore introduce four models to demonstrate their capabilities in memorization, reasoning, learning, natural language generation, and understanding. These findings advance our understanding of natural language and provide a framework for investigating the cognitive system’s information processing through structural analysis of natural language.