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Language and the Brain (class)
fall 2021 classes
Class 1
- What do linguists do?
- Linguists as part of cognitive science
- There exists some sentences of setnences such that it allows for recursive composition
- So once we setup the idea that English cannot be a FSM, what is the data?
- 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)
- “there exists a faculty of language” - but is there a single faculty of langauge
Class 2 - 9/13
- what is the neo-durkheimian relationship between langauge and thought?
- 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
- for chomsky, grammar is the compression of language, and if you memorize words you can generate an infinite set of sentences
- 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?
- what was the theory of cognitive science before the 60’s?
- learning is the intentional modification of the environment in order to produce different future behaviors
- 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
Class 3 - 9/15
- 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
- many things are understood about linguistics via numbers and color systems
- how to understand rules?
- through the enforcement of cultural roles
- how are the roles communicated and enforced?
- what happens if you violate it?
- studies about generalizablity of specific groups have never been totally innocent - largely driven by social policy
- 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
- future tense does not seem to be a a fundalmental building blocks of language
- present tense is a mess because stateive and others
- grimm’s laws are simple, but the explanation could be complicated
- “laws” of languages often end up generalizing idiosyncratic effects to that languge
- 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?
Class 5 - 9/22
- 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)
- the other inviariance is when you have two different phonemmes, but how do we know what the nominative case is?
- 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?
- jakobson is still a version of structuralism
- are word embeddings structuralist?
- quine - early sentence embeddings -> the context is what matters, the company it keeps
- possiblies of derivational frequencies
- derevational family entropy says there is neural reponse
- why do generalizations happen in suffixes in english?
Class 6 - 9/27
- Standard linguistics metholdogy is the method of contrast principles
- contrast structures that are parallels
- examples:
| Toler- |
Teach- |
Clash |
| tolerant (adj) |
teach (/) |
Clash (noun) |
| tolerance (noun) |
teach |
Clash (verb) |
| tolerate (verb) |
|
|
| tolerable (adj) |
|
|
- 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
- derivational family entropy on mandarin?
- example:
- unflush(/) - no
- unflushable - yes
- why does (un) require a suffix?
- what does linguistics look like with implementation within the brain?
- context free - a sentence consists of a noun phrase and a verb phrase
- case markings - NP-> NPACC/v-
- when a noun phrase is accusative when its next to a verb, which are context sensitive
- A context free grammar cannot be duplicated. Lanugages like Yoruba which exhibits duplication, “buildhouse-buildhouse” -> builder
- Swiss german is the only clear examples of midly 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
- pholonogy is theorized to be subregular
- morpohology and syntax are much more complicated
Class 7 - 9/29
- 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
- heinz and isardi claim that phronology is sub-regular
- constraints on grammar
- generally deal with locality
- grammar trees can show you how things block locality
- regular, natural, and CFG’s circle layering
- 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
- let us assume subregular grammar math is the math used for human language -> formal universal
- langauges have nouns and verbs as invariants -> Jakobson
- 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