Productivity and Reuse In Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage
Timothy J. O'Donnell
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, general ... More
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.
Keywords:
language,
productivity,
productivity and reuse,
storage and computation,
probabilistic model,
computational model,
fragment grammars,
inflectional morphology,
derivational morphology,
past tense
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262028844 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: May 2016 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262028844.001.0001 |
