1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910461722303321

Autore

O'Donnell Timothy J. <1977->

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

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

©2015

ISBN

0-262-32681-7

0-262-32680-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (350 p.)

Disciplina

410.1/51

Soggetti

Psycholinguistics - Mathematical models

Memory

Language and languages

Cognitive grammar

Recognition

Psycholinguistics

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

"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.