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Productivity and Reuse in Language : A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage /
"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 the...
| Autor principal: | |
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| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
London, England :
The MIT Press,
[2015]
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| Colección: | Book collections on Project MUSE.
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | "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. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (360 pages): illustrations |
| ISBN: | 9780262326803 |