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Productivity and Reuse In Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage

Online ISBN:
9780262326803
Print ISBN:
9780262028844
Publisher:
The MIT Press
Book

Productivity and Reuse In Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage

Timothy J. O'Donnell
Timothy J. O'Donnell
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Published:
14 September 2015
Online ISBN:
9780262326803
Print ISBN:
9780262028844
Publisher:
The MIT Press

Abstract

Language allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This fundamental and much-celebrated property is made possible by a division of labor between a large inventory of stored items (e.g., affixes, words, idioms) and a computational system that productively combines these stored units on the fly to create a potentially unlimited array of new expressions. A language learner must discover a language’s productive, reusable units and determine which computational processes can give rise to new expressions. But how does the learner differentiate between the reusable, generalizable units (for example, the affix -ness, as in coolness, orderliness, cheapness) and apparent units that do not actually generalize in practice (for example, -th, as in warmth but not coolth)? This book proposes a formal computational model, fragment grammars, to answer these questions. This model treats productivity and reuse as the target of inference in a probabilistic framework, asking how an optimal agent can make use of the distribution of forms in the linguistic input to learn the distribution of productive word-formation processes and reusable units in a given language.

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