recent paper (Dunn et al. in Nature)

[T. Florian Jaeger]

Dear Tom,

I recently started drafting a position paper for Language and Cognitive
Processes that outlines what I perceive to be the major challenges to what I
might loosely call functionalist linguistics (the paper is not on functional
linguistics, but rather on language production and to what extent it is
driven by considerations about communicative efficiency). I should send it
to you for feedback once it's ready (like, 2018 ;). But here's the gist of
the introduction to that paper.

I think the first big challenge is to define 'utility' in principled terms.
That's where, I think, recent work building on information theory and
Bayesian models has made much progress (although there is still tons to do).
This work picks upon  ideas that have been around for some time and tries to
make provide a formal backbone to them. This line of work aims derive what
speakers and comprehenders should do *under the assumption that language use
is set up to facilitate *efficient and robust communication from basic
assumptions about communication through a noisy channel (for example, Genzel
and Charniak's 2002 Constant Entropy Rate hypothesis, which is derived from
Shannon's noisy channel theorem; van Son and Pols work on the amount of
information a segment carries and its phonetic realization; Aylett and
Turk's 2004 Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis and their test against
phonetic reduction; Levy and Jaeger's 2007 proof that a uniform distribution
of Shannon information across the linguistic signal minimizes processing
costs under certain assumption, etc.; that work is summarized briefly in
Jaeger and Tily, 2011-WIRE and in much more detail in Jaeger, 2010-Cognitive
Psychology, both refs were given in my previous email).

As you said, notions of utility (which I am using as a placeholder term for
all kinds of ideas as to what's good for language usage) also need to be
supported empirically, e.g. by psycho-linguistic studies (the Jaeger and
Tily 2011 paper aims to provide a 7 page summary of work on sentence
processing over the last four decades that, we think, linguists working on
language usage would benefit from knowing about).

The second big challenge is to identify how functional (and perhaps also
non-functional) biases affect the transmission of language from generation
to generation. There's two basic logical possibilities that are mutually
compatible. Biases can operate during language acquisition and they can
operate during language production (cf. Bates and MacWhinney 1982), possibly
involving long lasting changes due to implicit learning over previous
productions. The artificial language learning and iterated artificial
language learning studies I mentioned in my previous email provide a great
(though definitely not perfect!) way to study the first possibility and I
very much hope that researchers with training in linguistics and, in
particular, typology will have a strong presence in this line of work.
Crucially, I don't just mean iterated language learning simulations, but
learning experiments with actual people (or better, actual infants). Today,
we received the reviews on our summary on this line of work from LT, so we
should soon have the final version with additional references up at the
address I mentioned in my previous email.

There's also a rather active line of work on language adaptation in adults
that can be seen as addressing the second possible transmission route. Most
adaptation work has been conduction on perception (there's, of course, a
long tradition of this work on phonetic perception going back at least until
the late 60s; more recently, we have also started to show that similar
effects are observed during syntactic processing). However, somewhat
unsurprisingly to anyone who ever tried to learn another language ;), this
work has found that changes in perception do not necessarily affect
production. To the best of my knowledge, there's relatively few studies that
investigate in a controlled way how production changes through exposure.
Most of them seems to be focused on phonetic production (actually, I'd be
curious to hear references, if people don't mind sending them to me). Of
course, there's tons of evidence for syntactic priming - but almost all of
that has focused on rapid effects, where "long lived" means that the effects
of priming can survive for a few minutes (e.g. Bock and Griffin, 2000; Chang
et al., 2006; Reitter et al., 2011 - searches for these names with the
keyword "syntactic priming" will give you the relevant references). I think
it's only recently that folks started to look at longer-lasting changes in
morpho-syntactic productions as a function of exposure. For example, Kaschak
and Glenberg (2004) showed how repeated exposure to novel structures (needs
washed) actually increases the probability that speakers later use the
structure themselves. These studies do, however, not yet show that there* *are
*functional* biases at work during such adaptive changes to one's
productions. But maybe readers of this list know of other work (e.g. in
sociolinguistics) that addresses this question? This is something I am very
much interested in and we have several studies running in the lab that try
to get at this question.

apologies for the long email.

Florian