Margin Notes On 22.8 "Interruptions"


Toleration of interruptions requires using agents that control STM. Minsky describes sentence clauses as interruption. In particular, relative clauses interrupt main clauses to provide new information. Importantly, this is all described in terms of agencies -- Minsky provides an example of an interrupting clause (and a main clause) having the structure of a Trans-frame. Finally, Minsky proposes that certain wh words in English are signals to engage STM, and act to interrupt the language agency and at the same time have it store its present pronome assignments temporarily.

One neat thing here is what Jackendoff would call "the cognitive constraint" -- use of language to signal mental processes. From another perspective, consider garden path sentences. One (standard) approach to account for them would be to talk about parsing of the sentence. Minsky's alternative perspective might be to consider conflicts in processing -- the garden path syntax, for instance, would not signal the necessary interruption of processing, leading to problems when different agencies need to be coordinated.


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