26.3989, Books: Productivity and Reuse in Language: O'Donnell

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-3989. Wed Sep 09 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.3989, Books: Productivity and Reuse in Language: O'Donnell

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Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2015 17:54:02
From: David Weininger [dgw at mit.edu]
Subject: Productivity and Reuse in Language: O'Donnell

 


Title: Productivity and Reuse in Language 
Subtitle: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage 
Publication Year: 2015 
Publisher: MIT Press
	   http://mitpress.mit.edu/
	

Book URL: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/productivity-and-reuse-language 


Author: Timothy J. O'Donnell

Hardback: ISBN:  9780262028844 Pages: 360 Price: U.S. $ 45


Abstract:

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 probabil
 istic 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.

O’Donnell compares this model to a number of other theoretical and mathematical models, applying them to the English past tense and English derivational morphology, and showing that Fragment Grammars unifies a number of superficially distinct empirical phenomena in these domains and justifies certain seemingly ad hoc assumptions in earlier theories. 



Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Linguistic Theories
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): English (eng)


Written In: English  (eng)

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