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Self-Assessing Agents for Explaining Language Change: A Case Study in German
"... Abstract. Language change is increasingly recognized as one of the most crucial sources of evidence for understanding human cognition. Unfortunately, despite sophisticated methods for documenting which changes have taken place, the question of why languages evolve over time remains open for speculat ..."
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Abstract. Language change is increasingly recognized as one of the most crucial sources of evidence for understanding human cognition. Unfortunately, despite sophisticated methods for documenting which changes have taken place, the question of why languages evolve over time remains open for speculation. This paper presents a novel research method that addresses this issue by combining agentbased experiments with deep language processing, and demonstrates the approach through a case study on German definite articles. More specifically, two populations of autonomous agents are equipped with a model of Old High German (500–1100 AD) and Modern High German definite articles respectively, and a set of self-assessment criteria for evaluating their own linguistic performances. The experiments show that inefficiencies detected in the grammar by the Old High German agents correspond to grammatical forms that have actually undergone the most important changes in the German language. The results thus suggest that the question of language change can be reformulated as an optimization problem in which language users try to achieve their communicative goals while allocating their cognitive resources as efficiently as possible. 1
Sign-Based Construction Grammar CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION
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1 Introducing Sign-Based Construction
, 2012
"... Modern grammatical research, 1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations ..."
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Modern grammatical research, 1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth highly abstract hypotheses making use of a complex system of representations, operations, and constraints that are offered as a theory of the rich biological capacity that humans have for language. 2 This community eschews writing explicit grammars of individual languages in favor of offering conjectures about the ‘parameters of variation ’ that modulate the general grammatical scheme. These proposals are motivated by small data sets from a variety of languages. A second community, which we will refer to as the Typological (TYP) camp, is concerned with descriptive observations of individual languages, with particular concern for idiosyncrasies and complexities. Many TYP researchers eschew formal models (or leave their development to others), while others in this community refer to the theory they embrace as ‘Construction Grammar ’ (CxG). 1 For comments and valuable discussions, we are grateful to Bill Croft, Chuck Fillmore, Adele Goldberg, Stefan Müller, and Steve Wechsler. We also thank the people mentioned in footnote 8 below.
Rhythmic parsing
"... A controlled reading experiment reveals that stress-based linguistic rhythm impinges on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent and oral reading. The results suggest that, at points of syntactic underspecification, the accruing prosodic representation may affect even the earliest stages of structur ..."
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A controlled reading experiment reveals that stress-based linguistic rhythm impinges on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent and oral reading. The results suggest that, at points of syntactic underspecification, the accruing prosodic representation may affect even the earliest stages of structure building, viz. the analysis of syntactic features of an ambiguous word. Such an effect remains inexplicable in the context of (psycho-)linguistic theories that assume a strictly unidirectional relationship between syntactic and phonological processes, the latter merely interpreting the conditions the syntactic component imposes on it. Here, a performance compatible competence grammar in the framework of Optimal Parsing is presented that is capable of capturing the reading data. The model integrates syntactic parsing and prosodification in reading and predicts that, at points of syntactic indetermination, weak prosodic constraints alone may guide syntactic structure assignment. This suggests a bidirectional relationship between syntax and phonology in grammar and processing while, at the same time, confirming a tight coupling of language production and comprehension. 1
At the Interface of (Bio)linguistics, Language
"... the-art overview of the field, more specifically, on psycho- and neurolinguistics and their relation to models of syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology, while advancing its limits with cutting-edge research. A distinctive feature of the piece is the strong presence of interdisciplinary work and th ..."
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the-art overview of the field, more specifically, on psycho- and neurolinguistics and their relation to models of syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology, while advancing its limits with cutting-edge research. A distinctive feature of the piece is the strong presence of interdisciplinary work and the internal coherence of the volume, integrating computational science, cognitive science, neurology and psycholinguistics, as well as syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology; an integration that is most welcomed as it triggers debate and productive revisiting of the machinery assumed within all aforementioned sub-disciplines of linguistics. The volume is organized around the notion of garden path sentences, relative clauses, and their relations at the processing level; this includes major problems of natural language processing and the relations between syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology from a more general point of view as well. The editors have chosen to open the book with a reprinted article by Thomas Bever, from 1970 (which becomes a recurrent motif to which the contributors refer once and again as a departing point, thus giving structural and
Referential choice across the lifespan: why children and elderly adults produce
, 2012
"... In this study, children, young adults and elderly adults were tested in production and comprehension tasks assessing referential choice. Our aims were (1) to determine whether speakers egocentrically base their referential choice on the preceding linguistic discourse or also take into account the pe ..."
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In this study, children, young adults and elderly adults were tested in production and comprehension tasks assessing referential choice. Our aims were (1) to determine whether speakers egocentrically base their referential choice on the preceding linguistic discourse or also take into account the perspective of a hypothetical listener and (2) whether the possible impact of perspective taking on referential choice changes with increasing age, with its associated changes in cognitive capacity. In the production task, participants described picture-based stories featuring two characters of the same gender, making it necessary to use unambiguous forms; in the comprehension task, participants interpreted potentially ambiguous pronouns at the end of similar orally presented stories. Young adults (aged 1835) were highly sensitive to the informational needs of hypothetical conversational partners in their production and comprehension of referring expressions. In contrast, children (aged 47) did not take into account possible conversational partners and tended to use pronouns for all given referents, leading to the production of ambiguous pronouns that are unrecoverable for a listener. This was mirrored in the outcome of the comprehension task, where children were insensitive to the shift of discourse topic marked by the speaker. The elderly adults (aged 6987) behaved differently from both young adults and children. They showed a clear sensitivity to the other person’s perspective in both production and comprehension, but appeared to lack the necessary cognitive capacities to keep track of the prominence of discourse referents, producing more potentially ambiguous pronouns than young adults, though fewer
