Procedural theories of linguistic performance

1981 ◽  
Vol 295 (1077) ◽  
pp. 297-304 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Computer Programs ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Adequate Model ◽  
Linguistic Performance ◽  
Numeral Systems ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Effective Procedures ◽  
The Ideal

In the modern theory of language it has been found useful to distinguish between questions of ‘competence’ and questions of ‘performance’. The distinction has at least two aspects. First, it recognizes that the description of a language as such is logically distinct from an account of the way in which particular people use that language, but, secondly, it separates questions of grammaticality from questions about naturalness or intelligibility. It is argued that, while the former distinction is valuable, the latter has now outlived its usefulness. A generative grammar can be regarded as an adequate model of the ideal speaker’s competence only if it is accompanied by a specification of processes by which ideas could be encoded in words, and these words subsequently decoded by the hearer. Examples are given of effective procedures, implemented as computer programs, for the performance of specific linguistic tasks; one of these, due to A. C. Davey, is a model of the production of connected English discourse; another, due to R. J. D. Power and myself, is a device that learns, from representative number—numeral pairs, the numeral systems of a variety of natural languages.

RUSSISMS IN THE MODERN SERBIAN LANGUAGE

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (103) ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
JELENA LEPOJEVIC
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
The Russian Language

This paper considers, from the point of view of modern theory of language in contact, words loaned from the Russian language or through the Russian language that are still in active use in the modern Serbian language. The aim of this paper is to determine the corpus of these elements in the dictionaries of the modern Serbian literary language, as well as to conduct a morphological and lexical-semantic analysis of the collected material. Many of these words are not perceived as borrowings by speakers of the Serbian language, but it is a fact that these elements came to the Serbian language from Russian. The author studies the words with the label rus. , identified by the analysis of Serbian language dictionaries. Words of Russian origin that are on the periphery of the lexical fund of the Serbian language, such as archaisms and historicisms, have not been taken into consideration.

scholarly journals Knowledge Acquisition from Critical Annotations

Information ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 179
Author(s):  
Tamás Mészáros ◽  
Margit Kiss
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Knowledge Acquisition ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Software Tool ◽  
Computer Programs ◽  
New Method ◽  
Factual Knowledge ◽  
Complex Task ◽  
Language Understanding ◽  
Natural Languages

Critical annotations are important knowledge sources when researching one’s oeuvre. They describe literary, historical, cultural, linguistic and other kinds of information written in natural languages. Acquiring knowledge from these notes is a complex task due to the limited natural language understanding capability of computerized tools. The aim of the research was to extract knowledge from existing annotations, and to develop new authoring methods to facilitate the knowledge acquisition. After structural and semantic analysis of critical annotations, authors developed a software tool that transforms existing annotations into a structured form that encodes referral and factual knowledge. Authors also propose a new method for authoring annotations based on controlled natural languages. This method ensures that annotations are semantically processable by computer programs and the authoring process remains simple for non-technical users.

scholarly journals The Menzerath–Altmann Law: Experimenting with Tatar Texts

2021 ◽  
Vol 163 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-189
Author(s):  
A.M. Galieva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Length ◽  
Coefficient Of Determination ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Linguistic Structures ◽  
Good Agreement

The Menzerath–Altmann law on the relationship between the length of linguistic units and the length of their components is one of the important laws of quantitative linguistics. This law is a result of an advanced linguistic structures organization and is of great importance for the modern theory of language aimed at revealing the relations between qualitative features and quantitative parameters of the language. The validity of the Menzerath–Altmann law has been confirmed in a number of works on languages with different morphological structures. The main purpose of this paper is empirical testing of the Menzerath–Altmann law on the Tatar language with the help of various fiction texts (both poetry and prose). The distribution of word forms in the Tatar language by length, observed values of the average syllable length depending on the word length, average values of the syllable length predicted by the model, as well as the model parameters were investigated for the analyzed texts. To assess the goodness of fitting of the model, the coefficient of determination R2, which for different texts ranged from 0.676 to 0.999, was used. It was concluded that G. Altman’s formula is in good agreement with the data of the Tatar language. The model predicts not only the decreasing average syllable length with the increasing word length (function monotonicity), but also its subsequent increasing (change in the function monotonicity) for a number of texts.

Ideal Foundations of Human Being in Culture: Socio-Philosophical and Ontological Aspects of Morals

Servis plus ◽  
10.12737/3888 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-23
Author(s):  
Сергей Копылов ◽  
Sergey Kopylov ◽  
Владислав Шелекета ◽  
Vladislav Sheleketa
Keyword(s):  
Negative Influence ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Moral Content ◽  
Individual Consciousness ◽  
Methodological Principles ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Psychological Activity ◽  
The Ideal

The article deals with an acute issue of modern theory of morals, namely, the ontological foundations of morals. According to the authors, morals, as well as human psychological activity in general, have an objective origin and roots. The authors´ idea is based on Jung´s theory of psychoanalysis. The authors claim that such central philosophical problems as the problem of the ideal and the correlation between the objective and the subjective can be solved provided the ontological basis is recognized as underlying all manifestations of the ideal, which is further interpreted through arts, social and moral norms. Thus, the ideal content of the individual and the collective consciousness is viewed through the lens of archetypes, which constitute the narrative content of works of art. Furthermore, the authors ´conception of the ontologically based ideal serves to support the idea of the negative influence of subjectivity as lacking the objective and moral content of the ideal reflecting the activity of the individual and the collective consciousness. The authors are convinced that every phenomenon of individual consciousness stems from archetypes, which are the basis for feelings, thoughts etc. This approach originates from the theoretical and methodological principles of psychoanalysis. At the same time, the innovative stance of the approach postulates the existence of archetypes promoting harmonic view and sense of the world, which share the objective moral character. In this respect, phenomena of collective consciousness individually manifest their identity in terms of pandemic unity. Thus, suprareflexity, unambiguity and regulative character of morals reveal themselves, and the spiritual is viewed as the most harmonic route for subjectifing activity of consciousness in accordance with the principal holistic «matrices», patterns of idealizing activity. The authors see conformity with these supraindividual matrices as the manifestation of the positive character of the life of society. From this perspective, morals are regarded as an expression of the necessity to adhere to definite ontological criteria of proper conduct and thinking.

Gesture-first, but no gestures?

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
David McNeill ◽  
Bennett Bertenthal ◽  
Jonathan Cole ◽  
Shaun Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Mirror System ◽  
Language Origins ◽  
Linguistic Performance ◽  
Theory Of Language

Although Arbib's extension of the mirror-system hypothesis neatly sidesteps one problem with the “gesture-first” theory of language origins, it overlooks the importance of gestures that occur in current-day human linguistic performance, and this lands it with another problem. We argue that, instead of gesture-first, a system of combined vocalization and gestures would have been a more natural evolutionary unit.

scholarly journals Generative Grammar: A Meaning First Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uli Sauerland ◽  
Artemis Alexiadou
Keyword(s):  
Logical Form ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Transformational Grammar ◽  
Linguistic Analyses ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Emotive Meaning ◽  
Late Insertion

The theory of language must predict the possible thought—signal (or meaning—sound or sign) pairings of a language. We argue for a Meaning First architecture of language where a thought structure is generated first. The thought structure is then realized using language to communicate the thought, to memorize it, or perhaps with another purpose. Our view contrasts with the T-model architecture of mainstream generative grammar, according to which distinct phrase-structural representations—Phonetic Form (PF) for articulation, Logical Form (LF) for interpretation—are generated within the grammar. At the same time, our view differs from early transformational grammar and generative semantics: We view the relationship between the thought structure and the corresponding signal as one of compression. We specify a formal sketch of compression as a choice between multiple possible pronounciations balancing the desire to transmit information against the effort of pronounciation. The Meaning First architecture allows a greater degree of independence between thought structures and the linguistic signal. We present three arguments favoring this type of independence. First we argue that scopal properties can be better explained if we only compare thought structures independent of the their realization as a sentence. Secondly, we argue that Meaning First architecture allows contentful late insertion, an idea that has been argued for in Distributed Morphology already, but as we argue is also motivated by the division of the logical and socio-emotive meaning content of language. Finally, we show that only the Meaning First architecture provides a satisfying account of the mixing of multiple languages by multilingual speakers, especially for cases of simultaneous articulation across two modalities in bimodal speakers. Our view of the structure of grammar leads to a reassessment of priorities in linguistic analyses: while current mainstream work is often focused on establishing one-to-one relationships between concepts and morphemes, our view makes it plausible that primitive concepts are frequently marked indirectly or unpronounced entirely. Our view therefore assigns great value to the understanding of logical primitives and of compression.

On phonotactically motivated rules

1974 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan H. Sommerstein
Keyword(s):  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
Consonant Clusters ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Phonological Rules

The main thesis of this paper is that the grammars of natural languages contain an exhaustive set of conditions on the output of the phonological rules – in fact, a surface phonotactics. I shall show that, contrary to what is usually assumed in generative phonology, a surface phonotactics is not redundant in a generative grammar if the grammar is indeed intended as ‘a theory of linguistic competence’ (Chomsky, 1965: 3), and that if any set of rules in the phonological section of the grammar is redundant it is the morphophonotactic rules, better known as morpheme structure conditions. I shall propose a format for the statement of rules (including so-called ‘conspiracies’) which are ‘motivated’ by the phonotactics in the sense of Matthews (1972: 219–220). Finally, I shall present a set of phonotactic rules for consonant clusters in Latin, and show how the statement of certain rules of Latin phonology can be simplified by taking their phonotactic motivation into account.

scholarly journals Virtually Legitimate: Using Disembodied Media to Position Oneself in an Embodied Community

2017 ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Lauren Miller Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Community Setting ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Common Pattern ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Technical Mastery ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The Way

Previous research on capoeira suggests that face-to-face training is the ideal mode of learning this art. However, there is a robust corpus of capoeira tutorials available on YouTube. This paper asks what the function of these videos is. I analyze six comment threads taken from YouTube that exhibit a common pattern, concluding that beyond the video’s utility as a source of information, the comments shared by community insiders serve as an invitation for aspiring students to join the embodied capoeira community, paving the way for their adoption of the underlying ethos of capoeira by socializing them into the ‘anyone can do it if they work hard enough’ discourse that is common in capoeira academies. And while this discourse itself is somewhat deceptive insofar as not everyone can do all of the moves of capoeira – even if they work hard – it is actually the mediating link between technical mastery, which could theoretically be achieved from watching videos, and embodiment of capoeira’s generative grammar, which must be learned in an embodied community setting. 

scholarly journals ‘Unravelling Babel’: Mary LeCron Foster on the origins of language

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Judith R. H. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Language Origin ◽  
Controversial Topic ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract The origin of human language has been a perennial – and perennially controversial – topic in linguistics since the nineteenth century. Much of this work has engaged themes Charles Darwin set out in The Descent of Man, though few authors acknowledge the text directly. How might we interpret such neglect? This essay contends that Darwin's reflections on language challenged foundational commitments in linguistics about the barrier between the history and prehistory of human communication. These commitments are thrown into relief through a detailed study of the dissenting symbolic and gestural theory of language origin put forth by Mary LeCron Foster, who rejected doctrines of linguistic arbitrariness and transformational-generative grammar. Her work on the frontier between animal and human communication is presented through a description of her ‘phememic’ account of the language origins. The paper also emphasizes the rhythm of Foster's career, which provides a significant counterpoint to standard accounts of the development and institutionalization of American linguistics during the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Language Mixing in American Norwegian Noun Phrases

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brita Ramsevik Riksem
Keyword(s):  
Feature Matching ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Distinct Pattern ◽  
Functional Material ◽  
Language Mixing ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Ideal

This article investigates the morphosyntax of American Norwegian noun phrases that show mixing between Norwegian and English and proposes a formal analysis of these. The data show a distinct pattern characterized by English content items occurring together with Norwegian functional material such as determiners and suffixes. In the article, it will be argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar is ideally suited to capture this empirical pattern. This framework crucially separates the realization of functional and non-functional terminals in an abstract, syntactic structure. Insertion of functional exponents is restricted by feature matching, whereas insertion into non-functional terminals is radically less restrictive. English exponents for noun stems are thus easily inserted into open positions in the structure, whereas functional exponents are typically drawn from Norwegian, as these are better matches to feature bundles comprising definiteness, number, and gender. In addition to the typical mixing pattern, the article addresses an unexpected empirical phenomenon, the occurrence of the English plural -s, and proposes a possible analysis for this using the exoskeletal framework. The formal analysis of American Norwegian noun phrases also exemplifies how an exoskeletal approach complies with the ideal of a Null theory of language mixing.

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