Language and the Brain (class) [fae3090e]

Linguists as part of cognitive science

• What is the consquences of this view?
• Chomsky - Syntatic Structures as the dawn of generative grammar

Langauges that use case markings

• case markings allow it to mtaintain a more consistent structure modulo case marking

chomsky is unconcerned with the statistical metadata that arises from a corpus

• "internalist" - grammars and structures within a single sentence
• "externalist" - set of sentences within a corpus

for sentences to make sense, we assign a phoronlogical structure to pronounce sentences

• which then means a sentence makes sense iff:

  • syntax (chomsky is here) is correct
  • phoronological sufficent (this can be derived from statistics)

is language just a set of sentences?

• in the 70's, they thought that sentences are a sequence of words or sounds

• what does this leave out? -> hidden syntax and semantics

  • syntax cannot directly be seen
  • semantics sometimes contain a truth value
  • oftentimes this forms the $\{form/sound, meaning\}$
  • chomsky identified this as a triplet of $\{form, syntax, meaning\}$

sentences in english are infinite due to recursion (aka not finite structured)_

• chomsky also distinguished between "lists" and "conjunctions"
• lists as $\mathbb{N}$

• however, langauge (or at least english) is "uninterestingly" infinite

  • as you push further out and generate more sentences, the sentences themselves become regularized

also must make a distinction between "actual" and "potential"

• "actual" sentences are bound by the maximum speaker time or computation time
• "potential" sentences are the infinite set of all sentences generatable

what are the grammatical rules for telling us if a word is an actual word?

• "moak" -> is this a word?
• we have grammars to say this is a potential word, but to reject a word, we actually do a semi-exhaustive search through our internal dictionaries to find out

some words enter the vernacular after it is used

• "jabberwocky", for example

how do we distinguish words that are archaeic/low frequency from words that are incorrect?

• side note finite state languages can delinate infinite sets
• this is known as the "strong and weak generative capacity"

what was the theory of cognitive science before the 60's?

• behavioralism

what is actually being "learned" when you acquire a langauge?

• a child does not do a blind word/object association (i.e. this is a ball)
• the faculty of langauge extends beyond this into "teaching" or "learning" a grammar and a generative capacity

grammars have variance built in

• this is why we speak differently
• language accomodation in arabic

Mendel's laws - laws of inheritances that require abstract concepts like genes

• organized in such a way that gives rise to laws

linguistic laws

• grimm's law - stated in terms of independent sounds - phonemes
• werner's law
• before these system laws, the idea that sound changes happened consistently/completely across langauges

when chomsky says linguistics as a cognitive science

• this is not to reject the generalization finding tools

dan everett - linguist in piraha

• no recursion in this language
• he proposes it comes from culture

how to understand rules?

• through the enforcement of cultural roles

  • how are the roles communicated and enforced?

  • what happens if you violate it?

    • shades of similarity to hart's theory of law

does grimm's law focus on the right things?

• are phonemes the correct unit of generalization?
• the persuasion of a generalization lies in the correlation of its properties

future is tied up with the concept of "irrealis"

• modals, conditions
• future
• counterfactuals

anthropoligists suggest that systematic study of langauge by pieces that exhibit discontinuities reflect culture

• is culture downstream of langauge?

compositionality

• meaning is composition
• labels can be generated from the hash of meaning
• label is the form/shape/demarker of the word?

Is phornology finite state?

• is it less powerful than finite state?

why do we care where in the brain something happens

• it matters how the brain recongizes faces, but to do so, we must first learn where

jakobson

• invariance
• /t/ - phoneme, slashes denote an obstruct t
• /t/ - goes into $[t^h]$ (as in "top") and $[t]$ (as in "stop", this doesn't actually exist in mandarin)

Jakobson says it is meaning

• the features are semantic ones
• therefore, it was incorrect to think of this as the level of the phoneme, but rather we should look at it from the meaning

internal/eternal

• prinicple of contrast

  • example: "top" vs "(t^)hop" - your pronouncation of "t" does not change the menaining, therefore the asperation is not used to define meaning
• feature grounding - in terms of articulation, Jakobson thought we should use acoustics (wrong)

paper fights with sausser

• meaning is distinct because it arises from the rest of the words

  • cat vs dog, elephant, etc
• sausser says language is ungrounded and that it arises from scarcity
• it is because meaning can be generated through differences, like a hash function

• what about religion?

  • what does the invariance come from?

possiblies of derivational frequencies

• derevational family entropy says there is neural reponse
• why do generalizations happen in suffixes in english?

Standard linguistics metholdogy is the method of contrast principles

• contrast structures that are parallels

the (/) suffix is somethimes null, which contrasts with the existence sometimes

• sometimes the metholodgy tells you the suffix is null

when you read toler[ate|ance|able] your brain generates the frequency distribution

• we have entropy/uncertainty over the continuities, called derivational family entropy

example:

• unflush(/) - no
• unflushable - yes
• why does (un) require a suffix?

case markings - NP-> NPACC/v-

• when a noun phrase is accusative when its next to a verb, which are context sensitive

Context-free is recursive (no memory)

• for some languages, context sensitivy is used only for certain features, like reduplication in Yoruba

  • why is this a problem?

    • this points to an issue where human langauges have certain mathematical properties that map to the brain
    • langauges are not evenly distributed between context free & context sensitive distribution
    • maybe we can't process certain context sensitivity
  • finite -> computablably enumerable are rough categories

repetition implies context sensitivty

• does english have similar properties?

• np by np construction

  • "dog after dog" is different than "little by little"

    • little by little is not a noun phrase
  • noun phrases are potentially infinite

constraints on grammar

• generally deal with locality

stabler

• for each grammar of a specific type (MC) there eixists an efficient parser
• stabler - subregularity of syntax gives you constraints on languages

• some sentences cannot be extracted from subject and adjunct

  • called CED by J Huang
  • for langauges can do subextraction from subject
  • example: "what did pictures of fall on Fred" -> "what" must be extracted from subject

merge ops

• even if you limit ones to subregular, the merge operations does whatever you want

  • noun-phrase is equivilant to a noun-prep phrase, since a noun-phrase is a merge of noun-prep

Stabler sees that we parse strings of words: word by word

• do you

  • generate sentences on your own until you find a match?

    • inefficient and non-deterministic

  • since we do not wait until the end of a sentence before parsing it, model a sentence interpretation as a probability distribution that's incremental

    • lineraly porportional to the number of words
    • using the finite set of words and finite set of rules: the cross product of both gives you the search space