Abstract not found

The first morphological learner based upon the theory of Whole Word Morphology (Ford et al., 1997) is outlined, and preliminary evaluation results are presented. The program, Whole Word Morphologizer, takes a POS-tagged lexicon as input, induces morphological relationships without attempting to discover or identify morphemes, and is then able to generate new words beyond the learning sample. The accuracy (precision) of the generated new words is as high as 80 % using the pure Whole Word theory, and 92% after a post-hoc adjustment is added to the routine.

Abstract. Formal syntax has hitherto worked mostly with theoretical frameworks that take grammars to be generative, in Emil Post’s sense: they provide recursive enumerations of sets. This work has its origins in Post’s formalization of proof theory. There is an alternative, with roots in the semantic side of logic: model-theoretic syntax (MTS). MTS takes grammars to be sets of statements of which (algebraically idealized) well-formed expressions are models. We clarify the difference between the two kinds of framework and review their separate histories, and then argue that the generative perspective has misled linguists concerning the properties of natural languages. We select two elementary facts about natural language phenomena for discussion: the gradient character of the property of being ungrammatical and the open nature of natural language lexicons. We claim that the MTS perspective on syntactic structure does much better on representing the facts in these two domains. We also examine the arguments linguists give for the infinitude of the class of all expressions in a natural language. These arguments turn out on examination to be either unsound or lacking in empirical content. We claim that infinitude is an unsupportable claim that is also unimportant. What is actually needed is a way of representing the structure of expressions in a natural language without assigning any importance to the notion of a unique set with definite cardinality that contains all and only the expressions in the language. MTS provides that.

Coordinate structures have traditionally been analyzed as having no internal structure other than the sequencing of their members. * In particular, the possibility that the members of coordinate structures may themselves be coordinate structures has not been widely recognized. Those who have recognized the possibility of such embedding of coordinate structures have assumed that there are no limits on the depth of such embedding, just as there are no limits on the depth of embedding in subordinate structures. However, coordinate-structure embedding in English occurs only in order to prevent coordinate structures from containing distinct connectives (e.g. and and or), distinct junctures (breaks) between members, and sequences of members in which the first is introduced by a connective while the second is not. In order to prevent these conditions from arising, the depth of coordinate-structure embedding does not have to exceed 2. This limitation on coordinate-structure embedding must be dealt with by the grammars of natural languages; it is not simply a performance limitation. Standard generative mechanisms (finite-state, phrasestructure, and transformational grammars, including recently proposed analyses of coordinate structures based on the Minimalist Program) do not provide an adequate account of this limitation. On the other hand, a theory of constraint satisfaction such as Optimality Theory, in which ranked constraints select the optimally structured outputs for given inputs made up of members, connectives and junctures, does do so.

The varieties of mathematical basis for formalizing linguistic theories are more diverse than is commonly realized. For example, the later work of Zellig Harris might well suggest a formalization in terms of CATE-

According to the standard definition, linguistic competence, the object of study of generative

The first morphological learner based upon the theory of Whole Word Morphology (Ford et al., 1997) is outlined, and preliminary evaluation results are presented.

One of the longstanding issues in language research has been the extent to which the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are uniquely human. The primary goal of this article is to introduce the reader to some of the recent developments in comparative language research that have shed new light on this issue. To appreciate the significance of the new developments, we begin with a brief historical overview of language studies that have adopted a comparative approach, and then discuss a subset of the relevant theoretical accounts that seek to explain why humans are the only species capable of acquiring language. We next focus on findings from behavioral studies comparing the performance of human infants and adults with nonhuman primates on tests that tap the perceptual and learning mechanisms that are fundamental to language acquisition. We argue that in cases where the behavioral data appear similar across populations, there is a need to investigate the underlying computational abilities and units of analysis to correctly specify the degree to which the mechanisms are truly shared or are uniquely specified. Dogbert: I once read that given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.