Productivity and reuse in language : a theory of linguistic computation and storage /
Author / Creator: | O'Donnell, Timothy J., 1977- author. |
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Imprint: | Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2015] ©2015 |
Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 337 pages) : illustrations |
Language: | English |
Subject: | |
Format: | E-Resource Book |
URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11358030 |
Summary: | A proposal for a formal model, Fragment Grammars, that treats productivity and reuse as the target of inference in a probabilistic framework. 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 )? In this book, Timothy O'Donnell 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. O'Donnell compares this model to a number of other theoretical and mathematical models, applying them to the English past tense and English derivational morphology, and showing that Fragment Grammars unifies a number of superficially distinct empirical phenomena in these domains and justifies certain seemingly ad hoc assumptions in earlier theories. |
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Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xii, 337 pages) : illustrations |
Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-331) and index. |
ISBN: | 9780262326803 0262326809 0262028840 9780262028844 |