Productivity and Reuse in Language

Date

Jan 20, 2015

Time

5:45 PM - 6:45 PM

Speaker

Timothy J. O'Donnell

Affiliation

M.I.T.

Language

en

Main Topic

Mathematik

Other Topics

Mathematik

Host

Prof. Dr. St. Schmidt

Description

A much-celebrated aspect of language is the way in which it allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This property is made possible because language consists of several combinatorial systems which can productively build novel forms using a large inventory of stored, reusable parts: the lexicon. For any given language, however, there are many potentially storable units of structure than are actually used in practice --- each giving rise to many ways of forming novel expressions. For example, English contains suffixes which are highly productive and generalizable (e.g., -ness; Lady-Gagaesqueness, pine-scentedness) and suffixes which can only be reused in specific words, and cannot be generalized (e.g., -th; truth, width, warmth). How are such differences in generalizability and reusability represented? What are the basic, stored building blocks at each level of linguistic structure? When is productive computation licensed and when is it not? How can the child acquire these systems of knowledge? I will discuss several mathematical models of productivity (computation) and reuse (storage), at different levels of linguistic structure. These models all treat the the problem as a tradeoff between the storage of frequently reused (sub)structures and the need to productively generalize to novel expressions. This computation/storage tradeoff is a special case of a general and well-known principle which balances the simplicity/generality of hypotheses and the degree to which they explain the primary linguistic data and is used in a variety of learning frameworks such as Bayes, Minimum Description Length, and others.

Links

• Seminar Musik, Mathematik, Kognition

Last modified: Jan 20, 2015, 2:15:18 PM