Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us. | Quanta Magazine

Tai-Danae Bradley is using the language of math to try to better understand language itself.

Her lens is category theory, a way of stepping back from specifics of any field in favor of a broader underlying framework that bridges all of them.

Linguists hope her model can help prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words.

In category theory, language and category theory go hand in hand, says Dr. Andrew Hammond .

He says language is all we started from raw data, but this conceptual content is there in the data used.

Hammond: We can start with simple frequencies, like how many times the word “cat” appears next to certain other words.

Linguists have debated over whether you need a world model to extract meaning from written language.

The idea that meaning lives in the arrangement of words is an old one in linguistics, but it’s largely fallen out of fashion in recent decades .

In your most recent paper, you also use category theory to bring entirely new concepts into the study of language.