Cognition, complexity and context as other minds: a tribute to T. Givón

Linguistics is made up of great individuals. Throughout its not so long history as compared with other sciences, linguistics boasts many remarkable contributors who paved the way for human language study and thus led us into exploring the rising, development and evolution not only of natural languages, but also that of our own species. This book is a tribute to one of those great contributors to linguistics, T. Givón. As he argues for an evolutionary approach to communication and language, Givón has covered various research fields in linguistics such as morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse and text, second language acquisition, pidgins and creoles, language universals, grammaticalization, and cognitive science.

Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation

What explains variation in human language? How are linguistic and social factors related? How do we examine possible semantic differences between variants? These questions and many more are explored in this volume, which examines syntactic variables in a range of languages. It brings together a team of internationally acclaimed authors to provide perspectives on how and why syntax varies between and within speakers, focusing on explaining theoretical backgrounds and methods. The analyses presented are based on a range of languages, making it possible to address the questions from a cross-linguistic perspective. All chapters demonstrate rigorous quantitative analyses, which expose the conditioning factors in language change as well as offering important insights into community and individual grammars. It is essential reading for researchers and students with an interest in language variation and change, and the theoretical framework and methods applied in the study of how and why syntax varies.

More Aspects of Aspects

Howard Lasnik elaborates on some of Anna Maria Di Sciullo’s points regarding Aspects of the Theory of Syntax—Noam Chomsky’s landmark text in the investigation of human language and cognitive capacity.

Emergence and Development of Contact Idioms in the Frame of Philosophy of Global Evolutionism

Based on observations of the emergence of pidgins, their further extension and transformation into creole languages (all these forms of language are denoted by the term "contact idioms" in this article), the hypothesis is put forward in this part of the exploration that the origin and development of the human language seem to be similar in many dimensions to the emergence and development of contact idioms. In support of that hypothesis, both the general conceptions of some contemporary evolutionary linguists (in particular, D. Bickerton, W.T. Fitch, T. Nikolaeva, B. Bichakjian) are described and evolutionary strategies for some particular languages and language families are surveyed. The similarity of evolutionary vectors of pidgins and creole languages and several of the other language families is assumed. Based on the considered linguistic material, it is postulated that the law "ontogeny manifests a repetition of several phylogenetic stages" or the recapitulationist theory – with all its ambiguousness from the standpoint of present-day biology – seems to be true for linguistic evolution. Attention is focused on the importance of using a comprehensive communicative-discursive approach to the study of glottogenesis, as described in the works of domestic and international linguists who specialize in evolutionary linguistics and general linguistics and whose names are mentioned above. The relevance of the material of contact idioms and languages of other groups and families listed in this paper for such purposes is emphasized.

Data Analysis and Sentiment Analysis on Amazon Reviews

In the present scenario, a person wants ease in their lives, so E-commerce has become a great and admirable involvement in providing the availability of any product at the doorsteps. But how a person can know the efficiency and originality of the product just by looking at the pictures and the details of the product on the websites. To overcome these issues the E-commerce websites have introduced the concept of the Reviews. Reviews are written by the customers who have already purchased it. Studies show that Product reviews are one of the most important points one considers during the purchasing from E-commerce websites like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and so on. This paper proposes a model that detects whether the given review is positive, negative, or neutral using the method of sentiment analysis. And using Data Analysis we can find the extension of this paper, we are planning to use a type of sentiment analysis, Opinion Mining which is the research field that predominantly makes automatic systems that will find opinion from the text written in human language. Using opinion mining, we can find whether the given reviews are fake or not. In this paper we have used Amazon food reviews data and based on the rating given by the user we are classifying reviews as positive, negative, or neutral. For positive review ratings given were 4 and 5. For negative review ratings given were 1 and 2. For neutral, rating given was 3. Based on these ratings, we are performing sentiment analysis using Scikit Learn and finding the accuracies of various classification algorithms. We are using Jupyter Notebook for visualization of documents and live coding. Keywords: Data analysis, classification algorithms, data visualization, machine learning

New Computational Methods and the Study of the Romance Languages

Nowadays, computer models of human language are instrumental to millions of people, who use them every day with little if any awareness of their existence and role. Their exponential development has had a huge impact on daily life through practical applications like machine translation or automated dialogue systems. It has also deeply affected the way we think about language as an object of scientific inquiry. Computer modeling of Romance languages has helped scholars develop new theoretical frameworks and new ways of looking at traditional approaches. In particular, computer modeling of lexical phenomena has had a profound influence on some fundamental issues in human language processing, such as the purported dichotomy between rules and exceptions, or grammar and lexicon, the inherently probabilistic nature of speakers’ perception of analogy and word internal structure, and their ability to generalize to novel items from attested evidence. Although it is probably premature to anticipate and assess the prospects of these models, their current impact on language research can hardly be overestimated. In a few years, data-driven assessment of theoretical models is expected to play an irreplaceable role in pacing progress in all branches of language sciences, from typological and pragmatic approaches to cognitive and formal ones.

Are Words the Quanta of Human Language? Extending the Domain of Quantum Cognition

In previous research, we showed that ‘texts that tell a story’ exhibit a statistical structure that is not Maxwell–Boltzmann but Bose–Einstein. Our explanation is that this is due to the presence of ‘indistinguishability’ in human language as a result of the same words in different parts of the story being indistinguishable from one another, in much the same way that ’indistinguishability’ occurs in quantum mechanics, also there leading to the presence of Bose–Einstein rather than Maxwell–Boltzmann as a statistical structure. In the current article, we set out to provide an explanation for this Bose–Einstein statistics in human language. We show that it is the presence of ‘meaning’ in ‘texts that tell a story’ that gives rise to the lack of independence characteristic of Bose–Einstein, and provides conclusive evidence that ‘words can be considered the quanta of human language’, structurally similar to how ‘photons are the quanta of electromagnetic radiation’. Using several studies on entanglement from our Brussels research group, we also show, by introducing the von Neumann entropy for human language, that it is also the presence of ‘meaning’ in texts that makes the entropy of a total text smaller relative to the entropy of the words composing it. We explain how the new insights in this article fit in with the research domain called ‘quantum cognition’, where quantum probability models and quantum vector spaces are used in human cognition, and are also relevant to the use of quantum structures in information retrieval and natural language processing, and how they introduce ‘quantization’ and ‘Bose–Einstein statistics’ as relevant quantum effects there. Inspired by the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics, and relying on the new insights, we put forward hypotheses about the nature of physical reality. In doing so, we note how this new type of decrease in entropy, and its explanation, may be important for the development of quantum thermodynamics. We likewise note how it can also give rise to an original explanatory picture of the nature of physical reality on the surface of planet Earth, in which human culture emerges as a reinforcing continuation of life.

St. John’s theorem

The article analyzes the spiritual-mystical components underlying speech, language and self-consciousness of a person. The research is carried out on the basis of an interdisciplinary scientific approach. The main attention is focused on the prologue of St. John, considered as a scientific theorem that paves the way for solving the problem of the existence of language and human self-consciousness. The methodological basis of the study is the author's concept of the formation of a sign-symbol of a mystical, disembodied being – a spirit, which formed the basis of a face symbol, in the phylogeny of humanity, as a consequence of mental mechanisms of transfer and replacement. This concept is used for the first time in the aspect of comprehending the prologue of St. John, which is the novelty of the study. The work logically substantiates the impossibility of the existence of the human word, and at the same time of abstract thinking and self-consciousness, without the psychic reality of an incorporeal, mystical controller and verbal designer of thought – namely, the spirit that prompts the subject to incessant acts of identification with him. At the same time, the logic of the study allows us to draw a conclusion about the scientific truth of the prologue of St. John, with regard to the beginning of human language and self-consciousness. Also, as a conclusion, the author emphasizes the key importance of a religious belief in a mystical ruler for the realization of the existence of language and self-consciousness of a person.

What Studying the Songs of a Distant Primate Relative Can Teach Us About Ourselves

Tarsiers are nocturnal animals. They have eyes that are heavier than their brains. They eat only insects and other living things. Tarsiers are primates, just like humans. And some species of tarsiers sing! Tarsier songs and human language are different in many ways. But if we study the similarities, it may help us better understand human language. In our study, we recorded singing tarsiers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. With the help of computers, we found that we could tell individual tarsiers apart based on their songs. Being able to recognize who is singing from far away may be an important function of tarsier songs. We also found that if a female speeds up her song, then the male speeds up his song, too. The ability to modify vocal output based on what others are doing is a universal in human language. Our results show that tarsiers (like humans) can change their vocalizations based on what their partner is doing. The fact that tarsiers and humans are both able to do this indicates that their common ancestor probably had this ability. Our results add support to the idea that flexibility in vocal interactions evolved long before the appearance of modern humans.

Trends In Natural Language Processing : Scope And Challenges

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyse large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them.NLP combines computational linguistics—rule-based modelling of human language—with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. Together, these technologies enable computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data and to ‘understand’ its full meaning, complete with the speaker or writer’s intent and sentiment. Challenges in natural language processing frequently involve speech recognition, natural language understanding, and natural language generation. This paper discusses on the various scope and challenges , current trends and future scopes of Natural Language Processing.