Are we interested in building a system we can use or one that
tells us something about the way people work (or both)?
Is knowledge specific to language built into the system, or is it
somehow acquired?
To what extent is linguistic theory relevant?
To what extent is the architecture structured?
Is the system highly modular?
How abstract are the representations used by the system?
Are the representations localized or distributed throughout the
system?
Are there variables?
How seriously do we take the temporal nature of language?
Is there an attempt to "ground" the internal representations (both
formal and functional) in perception or action?
Is there a concern with the nature of primitive notions such as
"relation", "role", and "reference"?
Is there centralized control of processing?
To what extent do components of the system run in parallel?
To what extent is it assumed that meaning is context-free and objective,
that language is compositional, that figurative language is a
peripheral phenomenon?