Productivity and reuse in language : a theory of linguistic computation and storage /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:O'Donnell, Timothy J., 1977- author.
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
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780262326803
0262326809
0262028840
9780262028844
Notes:Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-331) and index.
English.
Print version record.
Summary:"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"--MIT CogNet
Other form:Print version: O'Donnell, Timothy J., 1977- Productivity and reuse in language 9780262028844

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