For half a century, the widespread occurrence of threshold in the nervous system, and the importance of threshold in the details of neuronic activity, have been well known. There is less known, however, about how threshold would show in the large – in the behavior of the organism as a whole. Two studies (Beurle, 1956; Farley and Clark, 1961) have been made of the behavior of waves of activity traveling through a nerve net. Both studies have shown that such a net would have difficulty in maintaining a steady activity, for the wave of activity tends either to die out completely or to increase to saturation. Far from being tractable and steady, from the standpoint of biological usefulness such a network displays an essential instability. Not only does it tend rapidly to the extremes of inactivity or activity, but, once there, it can be moved away from the extreme only with difficulty. This finding deserves emphasis because it is quite contrary to the plausible idea that threshold stabilizes a network. It also suggests that the actual brain must incorporate some mechanism that actively opposes the instability. The studies cited are complex and do not allow the instability and the threshold to be related directly and simply. Here, we shall show that an extremely general and simple rr.odel still allows the relation to be displayed clearly. It also allows us to see more readily what is essential.

Accepting Ceccato’s theory of the operational structure of human thought, the author demonstrates the possibility of breaking up the meaning of words into combinations of smaller constant elements (semantic particle) of meaning. Taking as an example a group of related English verbs, the analysis shows that the differences between their meanings can always be accounted for by a difference in the combination of semantic particles constituting their nominata. A comparison with a closely related group of German verbs shows that one can never expect to find an exact interlanguage correspondence between the signification of words, even when they are given as equivalents in traditional dictionaries. The semantic patterns indicated in this essay are the result of a first analysis and may be subject to correction when the research is extented to a larger vocabulary.

Key words: semiotics

Key words: machine translation, cybernetics

Key words: machine translation, semiotics

Key words: language, semiotics