Three Design Principles of Language: The Search for Parsimony in Redundancy

Beekhuizen, Barend; Bod, Rens; Zuidema, Willem

doi:10.1177/0023830913484897

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Because infants do not know where word boundaries are (or what inflections are), their early inventory may include multi-word chunks (e.g., I-don't-know) that become fully analyzed later on (Abbot- Smith & Tomasello, 2006). Multi-word chunks are suggested to play an important role in learning grammar (Arnon, 2010;Arnon & Ramscar, 2012), and have been used as building blocks in several recent computational models (Beekhuizen, Bod, & Zuidema, 2013;Bod, 2009;McCauley & Christiansen, 2011).…”

Section: Modeling Multi-word Frequency Effects: Storage Versus Computationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent years have seen an increased interest in emergentist models of language where language structure is intrinsically tied to language use. Whether implemented using connectionist networks (McClelland, 2010;McClelland et al, 2010), exemplar-based representations (Beekhuizen et al, 2013;Bod, 2009), dynamic-system theory (Elman, 2009), or discriminative learning mechanisms (Baayen, Milin, Filipovic Durdevic, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2011;Baayen et al, this volume), such models undermine the traditional distinction between words and rules specifically (Chomsky, 1965;Pinker, 1999)-as well as between the lexicon and grammar more generally-and argue instead that all linguistic material is processed and represented by the same cognitive mechanism. Knowing a language, in such approaches, means acquiring a complex system of patterns-ranging from words through multi-word sequences to more abstract constructions (Bybee, 1998;Goldberg, 2006;Sag, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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More than Words: The Effect of Multi-word Frequency and Constituency on Phonetic Duration

2013

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There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to the distributional properties of multi-word sequences. Such findings expand the range of information speakers are sensitive to and call for processing models that can represent larger chains of relations. In the current paper we investigate the effect of multi-word statistics on phonetic duration using a combination of experimental and corpus-based research. We ask (a) if phonetic duration is affected by multi-word frequency in both elicited and spontaneous speech, and (b) if syntactic constituency modulates the effect. We show that phonetic durations are reduced in higher frequency sequences, regardless of constituency: duration is shorter for more frequent sequences within and across syntactic boundaries. The effects are not reducible to the frequency of the individual words or substrings. These findings open up a novel set of questions about the interaction between surface distributions and higher order properties, and the resulting need (or lack thereof) to incorporate higher order properties into processing models.

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Section: Modeling Multi-word Frequency Effects: Storage Versus Computationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than Words: The Effect of Multi-word Frequency and Constituency on Phonetic Duration

2013

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“…(Hockett 1965, Grosjean 1980, Allopenna et al 1998) and allows speakers the flexibility of producing the same output via different processing routes (e.g. Langacker 1987, Kapatsinski 2010a, Beekhuizen et al 2013. Redundancy means that features will typically agree with each other in predicting the value of some other feature, making models that have very different weights on the predicting features perform approximately equally well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

Barth¹,

Kapatsinski

2017

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is Abstract: The present paper presents a multimodel inference approach to lin guistic variation, expanding on prior work by Kuperman and Bresnan (2012). We argue that corpus data often present the analyst with high model selection uncer tainty. This uncertainty is inevitable given that language is highly redundant: ev ery feature is predictable from multiple other features. However, uncertainty in volved in model selection is ignored by the standard method of selecting the single best model and inferring the effects of the predictors under the assumption that the best model is true. Multimodel inference avoids committing to a single model. Rather, we make predictions based on the entire set of plausible models, with contributions of models weighted by the models' predictive value. We argue that multimodel inference is superior to model selection for both the ILanguage goal of inferring the mental grammars that generated the corpus, and the ELanguage goal of predicting characteristics of future speech samples from the community represented by the corpus. Applying multimodel inference to the classic problem of English auxiliary contraction, we show that the choice between multimodel inference and model selection matters in practice: the best model may contain predictors that are not significant when the full set of plau sible models is considered, and may omit predictors that are significant consid ering the full set of models. We also contribute to the study of English auxiliary contraction. We document the effects of priming, contextual predictability, and specific syntactic constructions and provide evidence against effects of phono logical context.

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“…The complex hierarchies of constructions are eliminated. There are no stored generalizations, hence the priority of the Beekhuizen et al (2013). 16 The same idea has also been proposed in rule-based frameworks under the names 'Paninian determinism' and the 'Elsewhere condition', e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What is grammar like? A usage-based constructionist perspective

Kapatsinski

2014

LiLT

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This paper is intended to elucidate some implications of usage-based linguistic theory for statistical and computational models of language acquisition, focusing on morphology and morphophonology. I discuss the need for grammar (a.k.a. abstraction), the contents of individual grammars (a potentially infinite number of constructions, paradigmatic mappings and predictive relationships between phonological units), the computational characteristics of constructions (complex non-crossover interactions among partially redundant features), resolution of competition among constructions (probability matching), and the need for multimodel inference in modeling internal grammars underlying the linguistic performance of a community.

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Three Design Principles of Language: The Search for Parsimony in Redundancy

Cited by 11 publications

References 37 publications

More than Words: The Effect of Multi-word Frequency and Constituency on Phonetic Duration

More than Words: The Effect of Multi-word Frequency and Constituency on Phonetic Duration

A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is

What is grammar like? A usage-based constructionist perspective

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