SynTalk

Are we neighbours? Do ghost authors write probabilistically? Could one build a house between your and your neighbour’s house? Can we draw a graph of the universe with colours of all the points in it? Do languages have distances from each other? How do sounds create neighbours linguistically? When/how can process states or words or sentences be said to be neighbours? Can A be a neighbour of B, when B is not a neighbour of A? Why can’t there be adjacent ‘points’? Are neighbours geometry dependent? Does the idea of neighbours change if time and/or space is continuous? Are scripts a technology to transmit (natural) language? Is Latin evolving? What role do texts play in language transactions and for context? How is pursuit of chess different from the pursuit of science? Can chess games be said to progress like sentences? Are humans language-using-machines? Is thinking of ‘only’ adjacencies as neighbours limited in most contexts? Are meanings neighbours? Are both humans (also randomly) and machines always changing the idea of neighbours? &, how did Hamilton Bridge become Barber’s Bridge? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from computational psycholinguistics (Dr. Emmanuel Keuleers, Tilburg University, Tilburg), discrete mathematics (Prof. Navin Singhi, ex-TIFR, Mumbai), & control theory (Prof. M. Vidyasagar, IIT Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Listen in...