Many theorists have dismissed a priori the idea that distributional information could play a significant role in syntactic category acquisition. We demonstrate empirically that such information provides a powerful cue to syntactic category membership, which can be exploited by a variety of simple, psychologically plausible mechanisms. We present a range of results using a large corpus of child-directed speech and explore their psychological implications. While our results show that a considerable amount of information concerning the syntac-tic categories can be obtained from distributional information alone, we stress that many other sources of information may also be potential contributors to the identification of syntactic classes. I.

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late 1950's. It's basic premises are that phonological structure reflects the linguistic competence of the individual native speaker to compute a phonetic representation for the potentially infinite number of sentences generated by the syntactic component of the grammar and that this competence can be investigated in a serious scientific fashion. The generative point of view has become dominant in the field of linguistics and has had varying degrees of influence on other cognitive sciences. This entry surveys the development of the generative approach over three fifteen-year segments and concludes with current research trajectories. 1. SPE: 1960- 1975 The early work of Chomsky and Halle both embraces and rejects various aspects of the two major schools of American Structural Linguistics inaugurated by Edward Sapir 1 (1884-1942) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). Sapir's "Item and Process " model posits an abstract Phonological Representation that is converted to a Phonetic Representation by processes that delete, add, and change sounds. Sapir stressed the

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This project describes a method which can automatically infer word classification. Previous systems designed to assign parts-of-speech to words sought the use of training data or were built upon rules devised by experts in linguistics. The report details the use of an unsupervised approach that can reduce significantly the reliance on prior linguistic intuition. The study looks in to how words behave relative to the function words. As these are the most common words, there is a great deal of information that can be attained. It was possible to analyse how the content words from a given body of text were distributed with respect to the function words. This information could be used as a profile, and therefore content words with a similar profile against the function words could be assumed to be of similar word class. Agglomerative hierarchical clustering techniques were applied to partition words into different clusters. Words that were deemed similar were grouped together, and thus, each cluster should contain words that posses the same part-of-speech. This project performed many experiments to investigate how the many factors affected the overall clustering performance, in order to find the optimal parameters. The results report an accuracy of 87% when performed on the LOB corpus. Experiments were also carried out with an alternative Spanish corpus and the clustering accuracy achieved 85%. Semantic clustering was also observed indicating the effectiveness of the described approach for the task of automatically acquiring word classification.

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concepts; categorization; space; number Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think “in ” language, hence that the absence of language would, ipso facto, be the absence of thought. One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’ triggered thought processes which had theretofore-- and consequently-- been utterly absent. Statements to the same or related effect come from the most diverse intellectual sources: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world ” (Wittgenstein, 1922]; and “The fact of the matter is that the 'real world ' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1941, as cited in Whorf, 1956, p. 75). * We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion of the semantics of raining, Ray Jackendoff for a discussion of phonology, as well as Dan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for their comments on this chapter. Much of our perspective derives from our collaborative work with

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Coherence relations have proved a useful tool in recent computational models of discourse. However, there is much disagreement between theorists about which set of relations to use, and also between analysts working within a particular theory as to how to analyse individual texts. These difficulties arise from the fact that present conceptions of relations lack a solid empirical basis. This paper describes a new methodology for determining a set of relations, whose starting point is a conception of relations as modelling psychological constructs. It is argued that evidence for these constructs can be sought in a study of the cue phrases that can be used to signal them in surface text. Introduction: Coherence Relations Many recent computational treatments of discourse make use of the notion of coherence relations to model the structure of text. Coherence relations have names like evidence, elaboration and sequence; they are taken to apply between two (typically adjacent) text segment...

categories that are not supported by concrete experience, such as AgrO, do not exist. On this approach syntactic theory itself has little if any content. Syntax is indeed "minimalist" with a vengeance. None of the specific formulations of GB theory and its extensions (Chomsky 1981; 1986) that rely on a type of Uniformity principle are particularly plausible, unless of course we find some motivation within the dynamical systems approach for such a principle. Space precludes a discussion here of how this approach leads to many of the positions adopted in the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (1995), and of the differences and similarities between the two approaches. 5. Conclusion If the conclusions that we have drawn are more or less correct, a single dynamical systems representation will account for competence, performance, and acquisition. But it does not follow that we should stop doing syntax or formulating syntactic theory. Syntactic theorizing remains as the means by which we try to...