242 Multicultural/Multilingual Electronically Mediated Communication

Modeling of semantic space is discussed with specific reference to the authors ’ NSF-funded project on knowledge representations in dictionaries, thesauri, and free text. Research findings are discussed in relation to future research needs. Keywords: semantic modeling, computing, text analysis, natural language, symbolic system access. As salient as any social science problem of the current moment and the next century is science and technology for communication among people who do not share a common language. Advances in massive computation, in linguistics and sociolinguistics, and in subspecialties of mathematics and computer science (e.g., lattice the-ory, order theory) now make reaching the goal of human-to-human communication globally a feasible grand challenge. Perhaps needless to say, successes on this front will be applicable to multicultural communication as well, inasmuch as (i) language is the dominant facet of culture, (2) interdialect and sublanguage communication is easier to achieve than multilingual communication, and (3) within a multilingual nation-state many speakers of one language also have some level of competence in another language or languages. Global integration-as to communication technology, economies, ecological interdependence, sociocultural (in)stability-mandates communication optimization within our species. We are members of the species that most needs easy, effective intraspecies communica-tion; but owing to the very plasticity for learning and responsive vari-ety that is the species ’ greatest evolutionary adaptive advantage, we do not share a language. Given the multiplicity of even the world’s major languages and the small time window within which a language can be learned to a native-speaker level of competency, it is evi