Embodied language, best-fit analysis, and formal compositionality.

This review brings together two fundamental, but unreconciled, aspects of human language: embodiment and compositionality. One major scientific advance in recent decades has been Embodiment - the realization that scientific understanding of mind and language entails detailed modeling of the human brain and how it evolved to control a physical body in a social community. The ability to learn and use language is one of the most characteristically human traits. Many animals signal, but only people can express and understand an essentially unbounded range of messages. The technical term for the ability of human language to support all these messages from a few dozen alphabetic symbols is Compositionality. Rigor is essential for the advancement of any science, but there has been essentially no overlap between efforts to formalize language compositionality and the manifest embodiment of thought. Recent developments suggest that it is feasible to formalize the compositionality of embodied language, but that this requires a focus on conceptual composition and better understanding of contextual best-fit.