The Probable Language Brain [2013, extended 2015] (original) (raw)
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:
Linguistic Understanding and Knowledge
Noûs, 2008
Is linguistic understanding a form of knowledge? I clarify the question and then consider two natural forms a positive answer might take. I argue that, although some recent arguments fail to decide the issue, neither positive answer should be accepted. The aim is not yet to foreclose on the view that linguistic understanding is a form of knowledge, but to develop desiderata on a satisfactory successor to the two natural views rejected here.
Abstracts in Anthropology, 2005
Numerous studies have dealt with the coding of information sources within and across languages. These studies have shown that despite the significant differences in the number of formally distinct evidentiality categories, languages tend to have grammaticalized markers for certain information sources, but not for others; different kinds of sensory perception, inference, assumption and hearsay evidence are among those information sources that receive explicit coding. In this paper, another evidence type, namely general knowledge, will be examined. It will be shown that general knowledge differs from other information sources in its nature, but it also has features in common with them. In addition, a formal-functional typology of general knowledge coding will be proposed based on the nature of the element used for this purpose. Finally, the rationale behind the discussed types and the central theoretical implications of the paper will be discussed. The attested types either stress the peculiar nature of general knowledge providing evidence for its independent information source status, or they emphasize the common features shared by general knowledge and other information sources, most notably reliability of information.
Linguistic Judgments as Evidence
A Companion to Chomsky, 2021
Introduction Linguistics research is filled with observations such as the following: 'There are three green books on the table' is an acceptable sentence, but 'There are green three books on the table' is not. Such judgments-as well as judgments about co-reference, ambiguity, pronounceability, and more-form a significant part of the evidence base for linguistics. This is in large measure due to Chomsky, whose work has exemplified the fruitfulness of such evidence and whose Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965, chapter 1) is a locus classicus for theorizing about their status. The prominence of judgment data in contemporary linguistics is crucially tied to Chomsky's mentalist reconception of the field. Judgment data were not completely absent prior to Chomsky's work. For example, field linguists did not always prescind from asking informants whether such-and-such was something they would say, and Chomsky's teacher Zelig Harris emphasized the importance for phonology of speakers' judgments concerning sound differences (Harris 1951). But the positivist, behaviorist, and structuralist positions that dominated American linguistics in the first half of the 20 th century tended to view the use of judgment data with suspicion and focused rather on produced sentences. The methodological strictures in part arose in reaction to problems encountered in earlier introspectionist psychology (discussed in section 3). But the focus on produced utterances reflected as well a particular conception of what languages are and thus what linguistics is about. Though linguists of this period differed in many ways, they shared a tendency to view languages as consisting in the totality of utterances speakers of that language can produce (an E-language in Chomsky's (1986) terminology); and much work focused on describing, analyzing, and taxonomizing languages so conceived-for example, the many Native American languages so apparently different from the Indo-European languages which were then more familiar to linguists. While such a conception does not of itself preclude the use of speakers' judgments (cf. the remarks on Devitt's (2006) views in section 2), it is more naturally combined with an emphasis on corpus data, especially given the methodological scruples already mentioned. Conversely, judgment data find a natural home in Chomsky's mentalist reconception of linguistics-a reconception, according to Chomsky (1966), that is in fact a recovery and development of earlier ideas about language. On this approach, linguistics aims, not just to describe linguistic products, but to provide a cognitive explanation of various of their distinctive features. One of Chomsky's core hypotheses is that there is an innately constrained computational procedure realized in the mind-brain-so-called I-language-that is implicated specifically in linguistic phenomena and whose character explains some of their distinctive features. As with aspects of our cognition more generally, we cannot directly observe I-language but must infer it from the effects to which it contributes. The methodological claim relevant to this chapter is that judgment data prove particularly useful in this endeavor.
Towards cognitively plausible data science in language research
Over the past 10 years, Cognitive Linguistics has taken a Quantitative Turn. Yet, concerns have been raised that this preoccupation with quantification and modelling may not bring us any closer to understanding how language works. We show that this objection is unfounded, especially if we rely on modelling techniques based on biologically and psychologically plausible learning algorithms. These make it possible to take a quantitative approach, while generating and testing specific hypotheses that will advance our understanding of how knowledge of language emerges from exposure to usage. Acknowledgments The financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (to Harald Baayen and Petar Milin) and the British Academy (to Dagmar Divjak) is gratefully acknowledged. We wish to thank Emmanuel Keuleers for providing generous help in implementing TiMBL, and Svetlana Borojević who provided access to the experimental hardware and software.
In this section of the Web Guide the relationship between psychology, and linguistics is considered with respect to learning and teaching. The main questions adressed are: what linguistics does a psychologist need to know and why?
Appliable Linguistics - An introduction
This chapter introduces the need to establish Appliable Linguistics as the framework through which we study language-related issues -in theoretical linguistics, Applied Linguistics and other language-related disciplines. Appliable linguistics is an approach to language that takes everyday real-life languagerelated problems -both theoretical and practical -in diverse social, professional and academic contexts as a starting point and then develops and contributes to a theoretical model of language that can respond to and is appliable in the context. The concept of Appliable Linguistics used here is built on the work of M. A. K. Halliday (1985, p. 7) who believes that 'the value of a theory lies in the use that can be made of it'; he continues: 'I have always considered a theory of language to be essentially consumer oriented'. Informed by this, the book considers Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) Appliable Linguistics. However, before further discussing Appliable Linguistics, we will outline why such an approach is necessary by reviewing the work done under the more familiar label of 'Applied Linguistics'.
Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics Introduction
Cognitive linguistics began as an approach to the study of language, but it now has implications and applications far beyond language in any traditional sense of the word. It has its origins in the 1980s as a conscious reaction to Chomskyan linguistics, with its emphasis on formalistic syntactic analysis and its underlying assumption that language is independent from other forms of cognition. Increasingly, evidence was beginning to show that language is learned and processed much in the same way as other types of information about the world, and that the same cognitive processes are involved in language as are involved in other forms of thinking. For example, in our everyday lives, we look at things from different angles, we get up close to them or further away and see them from different vantage points and with different levels of granularity; we assess the relative features of our environment and decide which are important and need to be attended to and which are less important and need to be backgrounded; we lump information together, perceive and create patterns in our environment, and look for these patterns in new environments when we encounter them. As we will see in this volume, all of these processes are at work in language too.