ABSTRACT
The nature of cognition is the use of knowledge to guide one’s attention and behaviour as a whole. There are various features involved in this, including: mental processes in terms of acquisition, representation and transformation of information into knowledge, knowledge memorisation (i.e., storage and retrieval), and the utilisation of knowledge for purposive reasoning. As far as natural language understanding is concerned, the major events during a cognitive process are semantic extraction and semantic inference through the use of knowledge. This chapter adopts a semantic memory model, i.e., spreading-activation theory, and a non-monotonic logic mechanism, or reasoning by default. A set of sentence patterns related to mono-valent nouns are analysed, with the view to demonstrating a novel approach to cognitive studies on language.
