The Probable Language Brain [2013, extended 2015] (original) (raw)
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Mathématiques et sciences humaines, 2007
This paper offers a gentle introduction to probability for linguists, assuming little or no background beyond what one learns in high school. The most important points that we emphasize are: the conceptual difference between probability and frequency, the use of maximizing probability of an observation by considering different models, and Kullback-Leibler divergence. Nous offrons une introductionélémentaireà la théorie des probabilités pour les linguistes. En tirant nos exemples de domaines linguistiques, nous essayons de mettre en valeur l'utilité de comprendre la différence entre les probabilités et les fréquences, l'évaluation des analyses linguistiques par la calculation de la probabilité quelles assignent aux données observées, et la divergence Kullback-Leibler.
Linguistics, Psychology and the Scientific Study of Language
In this paper I address the issue of the subject matter of linguistics. According to the prominent Chomskyan view linguistics is the study of the language faculty, a component of the mind-brain, and is therefore a branch of cognitive psychology. In his recent book Ignorance of Language Michael Devitt attacks this psychologistic conception of linguistics. I argue that the prominent Chomskyan objections to Devitt's position are not decisive as they stand. However, Devitt's position should ultimately be rejected as there is nothing outside of the mind of a typical speaker that could serve to fix determinate syntactic rules of her language or constitute the supervenience base of her connection to any such rules.
(Majors in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence) Acknowledgments
2004
Even though many words have been written within this thesis in order to justify a symmetric access to (linguistic) knowledge both from a production and from a comprehension perspective, the story of these pages should point out that there could be much more work from the comprehension side than from the production one. I suppose this to be true because of two (minimalist, cf. 2.2.2) fundamental points: 1. we should produce something ONLY when we are sure that we comprehended our knowledge fragment, that is, we tried to evaluate if it is coherent, robust, complete and interesting and therefore worth producing; 2. this is because the complexity of the world is so high (due to the huge “space of the problem”, cf. §1.4), that producing something runs the risk of simply being ignored (best case) or making others waste their precious time trying to comprehend our (incomplete) knowledge fragment (worst case); Following these rules of thumb, I spent almost-four-years just comprehending the ...
Linguistic Intuitions are not the Voice of Competence
2013
How should we go about finding the truth about a language? The received answer in linguistics gives a very large role to the intuitive linguistic judgments of competent speakers about grammaticality/acceptability, 1 ambiguity, coreference, and the like. Thus, Noam Chomsky claims that ‘linguistics ...is characterized by attention to certain kinds of evidence...largely, the judgments of native speakers’ (1986: 36). Carson Schütze remarks: