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Learning-Theoretic Foundations of Linguistic Universals
Abstract
Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a constraint on the relationship between semantic and syntactic structure that makes verifiable predictions of syntactic universals. The relationship between the notion of 'explanatory adequacy' of a theory of grammar and the learnability of a class of transformational grammars is discussed.
... Recent work by Wexler, Culicover, and Hamburger (1975;Wexler & Culicover, 1980) suggests how formal constraints might be involved in a theory of language acquisition. Wexler (1978) argues that developmental psycholinguists and theoretical linguists have acted as if they were at odds, when in fact they are engaged in complementary disciplines with similar goals. ...
... In fact, the binary principle is strikingly similar to the subjacency principle, which was independently proposed by Chomsky (1973). Thus, Wexler et al. (1975;Wexler & Culicover, 1980) offer complementary pieces of evidence-one from linguistic universals and the other from a formal theory of language learning-that point toward the same set of constraints. ...
Traditionally, cognitive development has been viewed either as the acquisition of knowledge through simple and highly general learning procedures (learning theory views) or as radical restructurings of knowledge (stage theory views). There is, however, a different view of cognitive development in which the emphasis is on the formal properties of cognitive structures and processes that remain invariant throughout development. It is argued that much of cognitive development is guided by complex sets of constraints, that specific sets are tailored for particular cognitive domains, and that the constraints sharply limit the class of naturally learnable structures in each domain. Theoretical reasons and recent advances in research are provided for such a view, which is also contrasted to other work in cognitive development. Four cognitive domains are considered in detail: ontological knowledge, number concepts, deductive reasoning, and natural language syntax. (76 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... What about parents' reactions to the language expressed by their children. Learnability theorists (e.g., Wexler et al., 1975) insist that without negative evidence, i.e., the learner being informed about what is not grammatical in his speech, no natural grammar could be learned. Actually, parents provide few explicit negative feedbacks contingent upon their children's utterances (Rondal, 1985). ...
... Introspective linguistic judgments about the well-formedness of linguistic stimuli have long been regarded as one of the most important sources of evidence in linguistics, essentially forming its empirical base (Wexler et al., 1975;Carr, 1990;Schütze, 1996Schütze, /2016Baggio et al., 2012). Both the techniques used to elicit such judgments (e.g., controlled experiments, self-introspection, or targeted questioning about whether a specific sentence sounds fine in a specific language) as well as the type of sample that is necessary for the results to have ecological validity (e.g., a pool of participants that is randomly selected from the targeted linguistic community, a nonrandom sample, or self-introspection) are a matter of debate (see Phillips, 2009;Gibson and Fedorenko, 2010;Sprouse and Almeida, 2013;Branigan and Pickering, 2016). ...
A search for the terms “acceptability judgment tasks” and “language” and “grammaticality judgment tasks” and “language” produces results which report findings that are based on the exact same elicitation technique. Although certain scholars have argued that acceptability and grammaticality are two separable notions that refer to different concepts, there are contexts in which the two terms are used interchangeably. The present work reaffirms that these two notions and their scales do not coincide: there are sentences that are acceptable, even though they are ungrammatical, and sentences that are unacceptable, despite being grammatical. First, we adduce a number of examples for both cases, including grammatical illusions, violations of Identity Avoidance, and sentences that involve a level of processing complexity that overloads the cognitive parser and tricks it into (un)acceptability. We then discuss whether the acceptability of grammatically ill-formed sentences entails that we assign a meaning to them. Last, it is shown that there are n ways of unacceptability, and two ways of ungrammaticality, in the absolute and the relative sense. Since the use of the terms “acceptable” and “grammatical” is often found in experiments that constitute the core of the evidential base of linguistics, disentangling their various uses is likely to aid the field reach a better level of terminological clarity.
... This is not, however, related to Emonds' development of root transformations…(pun due to Susan Schmerling and enthusiastically endorsed here).175 The freezing principle was, to the best of our knowledge, first proposed byWexler, Culicover, and Hamburger (1975). Informally, they claimed that 'if the immediate structure of a node in a derived phrase marker is non-base [i.e., derived by a transformation] then the node is frozen'. ...
This work is a study of the nature of cognitive computation, with a focus on the relation between computation, linguistic theory, and grammar. We review traditional notions of computation and analyse their applicability to natural language, distinguishing the latter from formal languages as these are usually studied in computer science.
The main theoretical result of the thesis is that imposing a single computational template for the assignment of structural descriptions to natural language sentences, while long accepted, is both empirically inadequate and theoretically more costly than a strongly cyclic approach in which computational dependencies vary, oscillating up and down the Chomsky Hierarchy of formal grammars. Specifically, we defend the idea that such a system delivers the simplest possible structural description that captures semantic dependencies between syntactic objects in local substrings. This hypothesis will be referred to as the theory of mixed computation. The analysis of theories of computation starting with the seminal work of Alan Turing (1936) will reveal that the theory of computable functions must not be identified with the theory of effective computation; this then permits us to argue for the necessity of introducing aspects of interaction in the study of physically realized computational procedures which configure dynamical systems. We show that mixed computation lends itself naturally to modelling dynamical systems.
Empirically, we present evidence for mixed computation derived from an analysis of strong locality conditions in natural language syntax, that is, locality constraints whose violation cannot be repaired or ameliorated. Specifically, we set our focus on the Coordinate Structure Constraint (Ross, 1967), which pertains to the extraction of terms from coordinated structures and how it can be shown to arise from a mixed-computation analysis. Data from English, Spanish, and Latin support the identification of two kinds of coordinated structures: one is finite state in nature, and cannot be probed into. The other is phrase structural (context-free), and its internal complexity is visible to further syntactic operations, including extraction. We argue that data from locality conditions as well as cyclicity in natural-language syntax are accounted for naturally under a dynamical model of mixed computation.
... Evans puts Klima's notion to use in straightforwardly characterizing when a pronoun is within the scope of (and hence bindable by) a quantifier expression. See also Wasow (1972), Wexler, Culicover and Hamburger (1974), and Culicover (1976). 82 Since mothers are female, there is no acceptable reading of (2). ...
Focus is a kind of prominence in a sentence, usually marked by stress. Recent research has shown focus to be a locus of interaction between semantics and pragmatics. This chapter surveys some of this research and draws three morals. First, it provides an example of how the appearance that something is merely pragmatic can be deceptive. Second, the fact that something is realized in linguistic structure, such as logical form, does not preclude its semantics triggering extremely complex pragmatic processes. Third, the kind of context-dependence involved in focus is different from the familiar sort involved in, e.g., demonstratives.
... For present purposes, however, this disagreement is of minor importance, since C. L. Baker (1979) has shown how a grammar fragment specified by Wexler, Culicover, and Hamburger (1975) and a corresponding set of hypothetical instructions to a child are intertranslatable. The significance of Slobin's findings is that they show, in far more detail than can be summarized here, structures consistently used by young children that violate the grammatical rules of their target languages but are consistent both with the rules hypothesized here for the bioprogram and with surface forms found in creole languages. ...
It is hypothesized that creole languages are largely invented by children and show fundamental similarities, which derive from a biological program for language. The structures of Hawaiian Pidgin and Hawaiian Creole are contrasted, and evidence is provided to show that the latter derived from the former in a single generation. A realistic model of the processes of Creole formation shows how several specific historical and demographic factors interacted to restrict, in varying degrees, the access of pidgin speakers to the dominant language, and hence the nature of input to the children of those speakers. It is shown that the resulting similarities of Creole languages derive from a single grammar with a restricted list of categories and operations. However, grammars of individual Creoles will differ from this grammar to a varying extent: The degree of difference will correlate very closely with the quantity of dominant-language input, which in turn is controlled by extralinguistic factors. Alternative explanations of the above phenomena are surveyed, in particular, substratum theory and monogenesis: Both are found inadequate to account for the facts. Primary acquisition is examined in light of the general hypothesis, and it is suggested that the bioprogram provides a skeletal model of language which the child can then readily convert into the target language. Cases of systematic error and precocious learning provide indirect support for the hypothesis. Some conjectures are made concerning the evolutionary origins of the bioprogram and what study of Creoles and related topics might reveal about language origins.
This is a short introduction to topics and problems in natural language processing that are of interest for connectionist research. We recall the natural language processing (NLP) problem and conclude that until now no promising approaches from a neural network (NN) point of view are available. It does not mean that there is no progress in this field. Rather than attacking the complete problem it has become customary to search for subtasks for which a NN approach is useful. In addition, the sometimes rather ad hoc and exotic approaches to language analysis have been replaced by fundamental research into sequence recognition, finite state automata (FSA) simulation and general research on grammatical inference with NNs. We do not confine ourselves to NN approaches, but survey a range of approaches to NLP and provide the framework in which connectionist NLP can be embedded and evaluated.
I take it that the chief concern of developmental psycholinguistics is the question of how the child learns language. Following Chomsky (1965, Chapter 1, and many other places) I take it that this problem is also the major concern of linguistic theory. Yet it is my impression that there is a tension between the two disciplines, as if the two disciplines gave two different kinds of answers to the same question. It seems to me rather that the situation would be more productive for science as a whole if the relationship between the two disciplines were more like a division of labour than one of competing viewpoints. In my opinion the tension exists at least partly because of a conceptual confusion. In this paper I would first like to explicate that confusion and then to sketch out, with examples from my own work, ways of making the relationship between the two disciplines more productive.
An argument that there are three kinds of English grammatical objects, each with different syntactic properties. © 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
Patrick Suppes contributions to the foundations of psychology all concern the development of psychology as a formal science. The aim is to develop formal theories that are conceptually clear and empirically testable in the spirit of theoretical work in the physical and biological sciences.
Since many basic principles of first language acquisition and environmental input have been clarified by research of the last decade, more differentiated questions are explored in the present study. The overall goal is to analyze language teaching and learning as it transpires during the course of verbal interactions in the home. This encompasses three major interrelated aims: (a) An extensive taxonomy of maternal language “teaching techniques” and filial language “learning strategies” is established incorporating the research efforts of the last two decades, (b) Markov chain models, based upon transitional probabilites, are employed for the description of sequential dependencies. With these sequential dependencies between teaching techniques and learning strategies, causal relationships can be explored in single‐subject observations. (c) Finally, to counteract past nomothetic tendencies and to demonstrate the value of the present approach for differential instructional/learning analyses, two dyads are compared in their idiosyncratic and differentially successful interactions. The children of these two dyads were approximately matched in mean length of utterances which ranged between 1,5 and 4,0 morphemes. The ages of the children ranged between 18 and 35 months during the period they were observed. The implications of the presented results for contrasting theories of language acquisition are discussed.
This book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind. Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: "native" to the mind rather than acquired. The author argues that this view is mistaken, demonstrating that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different-and probably inconsistent-theses about the mind. Unlike empiricists, who postulate domain-neutral learning strategies, nativists insist that some learning tasks require special kinds of skills, and that these skills are hard-wired into our brains at birth. This "faculties hypothesis" finds its modern expression in the views of Noam Chomsky. The author, marshalling recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics, provides a critique of Chomsky's nativism and defends in its place a moderately nativist approach to language acquisition. Also, in contrast to empiricists, who view the mind as simply another natural phenomenon susceptible to scientific explanation, nativists suspect that the mental is inelectably mysterious. The author addresses this second strand in nativist thought, taking on the view articulated by Jerry Fodor and other nativists that learning, particularly concept acquisition, is a fundamentally inexplicable process. She challenges this explanatory pessimism, and argues that concept acquisition is psychologically explicable.
How to explain the fact that children learn language is a central problem for both psychology and linguistics. Suppes says that “the linguists' insistence that they will accept nothing less than a complete and detailed account will probably turn out to be the most important conceptual demand on psychology in this century”. This paper speaks to that demand by presenting a complete formal characterization of the learning process and the language environment in which it operates. The assumptions are in general accord with psychological and linguistic principles. It is proved that the system converges; that is, the learning process, acting on the linguistic information it receives, learns the language, according to a formal criterion.
Human infants are predisposed to organize their experience in terms of certain concepts and not in terms of others. The favored concepts are called natural, the remainder, unnatural. A major problem in psychology is to state a principled distinction between the two kinds of concepts. Toward this end, the present paper offers three, formal necessary conditions on the naturalness of concepts. The conditions attempt to link the problem of naturalness to the distinctions between sense versus nonsense, simplicity versus complexity, and validity versus invalidity.RésuméIl y a une prédisposition pour les bébés à organiser leur expérience dans le cadre de certains concepts et non selon d'autres. Les concepts favorisés sont dits naturels, les autres sont dits non-naturels. Un probléme majeur en psychologie consiste à trouver une distinction de principle entre ces deux sortes de concepts. Pour cela on propose trois conditions formelles nécessaires qui permettent de statuer sur le “naturel” des concepts. Ces conditions lient le probléme du “naturel” à des distinctions entre sens versus non-sens, simplicité versus complexité et validité versus non-validité.
Maasai women and men are compared with respect to their classifications of personality descriptors modifying social identity terms. Substantial sex differences are found and are interpreted in terms of Maasai culture and social organization. These findings are integrated with a theory of cognitive variability based on notions of markedness. [psychological anthropology, personality, sex differences, perception, Maasai]
Phenomena of language teaching and learning in the course of verbal interactions between one mother and her daughter were analyzed. The daughter was between 18 and 27 months old during the recordings, and her utterance length ranged from 1,5 to 4,0 morphemes. Twenty hours of interactions were analyzed and the emphasis was placed upon sequential aspects and mathemagenic features of the conversations. It was demonstrated that the mother performs much analytic, synthetic, abstracting, and word-class-defining work during these verbal interactions. These maternal instructional activities seem to lead not only to the child's learning of language rules but also to her employment of the abstracting, analytical, and synthetic methodology. It is concluded that the main explanatory focus has to be on the mother in the attempts to explain language transmission and acquisition. Basic similarities to other instructional/skill training situations are suggested. Neither extraordinary complex cognitive nor innate linguistic capacities need to be assumed to explain the phenomena in question.
In this paper I introduced three of the central constraints of the learnability proof of Wexler and Culicover (1980). The question arose as to how we might handle in other ways the data that the Raising Principle accounts for. While a processing account appears plausible, it appears that at least one promising analysis of that sort does not work. In section 3 I suggested that processing explanations for data accounted for by another learnability constraint, the Freezing Principle, are not as straightforward as might have been supposed.
Since this issue of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory is dedicated to the memory of Adrian Akmajian, I would like to express here my own sense of loss. He was a linguist who made significant contributions to the field. He was a colleague who was always ready with helpful comments and criticism, as was the case with this particular paper. And for me, he was my closest and dearest friend, and I will always miss him.
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