Productivity and reuse in language : a theory of linguistic computation and storage / Timothy J. O'Donnell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Donnell, Timothy J., 1977- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psycholinguistics--Mathematical models.

Psycholinguistics.

Memory.

Language and languages.

Cognitive grammar.

Cognition.

Language acquisition.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (350 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"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.

Contents:

Contents; Preface; Acknowledgments; I MODEL BACKGROUND AND DEVELOPMENT; 1 Introduction; 2 The Framework; 3 Formalization of the Models and Inference; II EMPIRICAL APPLICATIONS; 4 The English Past Tense: Abstraction and Competition; 5 The English Past Tense: Simulations; 6 English Derivational Morphology: Productivity, Processing, and Ordering; 7 English Derivational Morphology: Simulations; 8 Conclusion; A Past-Tense Inflectional Classes; B Derivational Suffixes; Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-32681-7

0-262-32680-9

OCLC:

921143252