Productivity and reuse in language : a theory of linguistic computation and storage /

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"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...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
1. Verfasser:
O'Donnell, Timothy J.
Format:
Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:
Englisch
Veröffentlicht:
Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2015]
Ausgabe:
1st ed.
Zusammenfassung:
"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.
Umfang:
1 online resource (350 p.)
Anmerkungen:
Description based upon print version of record.
Anmerkungen:
English
Bibliografie:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:
0-262-32681-7
0-262-32680-9
Schlagworte:
Psycholinguistics > Mathematical models.
Memory.
Language and languages.
Cognitive grammar.
Cognition.
Psycholinguistics.
Language acquisition.
Bezugswerke:
Links: