5 ms·

I know that Chomsky knows about inflectional morphology and so I'm sure that his theory does try to account for it, but I was frustrated that all of the example

by schoen 7y ago

I know that Chomsky knows about inflectional morphology and so I'm sure that his theory does try to account for it, but I was frustrated that all of the examples here were only about word order. The author said > Word order is, of course, is far more complex than I’ve shown here. There are languages with very free word order, and even within languages there are many intriguing complexities. However, this idea, that Merge can both combine bits of language, and reuse them, gives us a unified understanding of how the grammar of human languages works. But none of the examples in this simplified account even gestured at noun case, or at the prospect of expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation, or at feature agreement. Is there a straightforward way to understand why Chomsky thinks that this approach addresses those phenomena?

JackFr 7y ago
Felt the same way. I'm not an expert on language by any stretch, but even I know the role of a noun in Latin is determined by its case rather than its position. Also is 'Merge' a thing? Or has the author just blessed his concept into proper noun-hood? It's not really explained.
- aasasd 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics)
- linguistbreaker 7y ago
  For sure. Merge is the most basic primitive for creating metadata. If you are familiar with RDF, which uses Subect-Object-Predicate triples that's more similar to Chomsky's original X-bar theory which calls these triples Head-Complement-Specifier. The difference is that Merge sees the triple as a derivative of the merge primitive and X-bar sees the triple as the primitive. Both are about the fundamental nature of metadata or data linkage/relationships and how meaning is derived. Both can be applied mostly successfully down the layers of the language stack - semantics -> syntax -> morphology -> phonology -> phonetics.
eindiran 7y ago
Many linguists believe the same set of principles act on sub-word units, a theory called Distributed Morphology or DM[0] "'Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down' entails that elements within syntax and within morphology enter into the same types of constituent structures (such as can be diagrammed through binary branching trees). DM is piece-based in the sense that the elements of both syntax and of morphology are understood as discrete instead of as (the results of) morphophonological processes."[1] So a rather simplified way to think about it is that each word is a little mini-tree and Merge operations create a branching structure between its constituent parts. Each of those words is then part of the larger sentence-level tree. The important this is that Merge is acting on the units at both levels. Similarly, Merge can act on structures that are the output of previous Merges, allowing you to have a verb, in a particular conjugation (it's sub-word structure), that selects for a particular type of supra-word structure (a tree) that's headed by a noun with some set of features, eg a particular case. Another point that is kind of alluded to in the article is that you can create movement from one part of a tree to another with Merge. In previous theories of syntax, there always needed to be both something like Merge and a special "move" operation. But Merge simplifies things quite a bit in that regard. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_morphology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_morphology [1] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/#how%20DM%20is%20different https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/#how%20DM%20is%20diffe...
- schoen 7y ago
  Whoa, that's amazing! Can you explain a little more about how something like an agreement rule would be analyzed in this framework? I suppose I didn't quite understand your "that selects for a particular type of super-word structure (a tree) that's headed by a noun with some set of features". Is this sort of akin to a type system in programming? Like the verb is only willing to bind with a subject noun phrase whose head has a particular feature?
  - eindiran 7y ago
    In this framework, you can think about a morpheme as being a tuple of features. Like you said, it is sort of akin to a type system, where passing the wrong type to a function won't work. A morpheme will select for a feature or set of features from whatever its merged with, and won't merge with something it doesn't agree with. I think using a language which doesn't care much about word order will be illustrative here, so let's use Latin: puella vidit canem The girl sees the dog We can break this down into: puell - a vid - et can - em girl - NOM.S.FEM sees - S.3 dog - ACC.S.FEM So 'puella' is the tuple of features [+NOM, +S, +FEM], 'videt' is [+PRES, +ACTIVE, +S, +3], etc. Here, we want to do a Merge with 'puella' and 'videt': we say that 'puella' selects for the features +NOM, +3, +S (nominative, third person, and singular) in its verb, but doesn't care about the others. It can still agree with its verb if the verb is passive or in the past tense. But if a verb is conjugated in a way that violates the features it selects for (eg the verb is conjugated as first person plural), 'puella' won't merge with it. As you said, a phrase level structure will have the features of its constituent parts bubble up to it. So once we've done the first Merge with 'puella' and 'videt', our structure is now selecting for a noun phrase that has the feature +ACC. Because 'canem' meets this requirement, we can get the final Merge necessary for our finished sentence. { { puella, videt }, canem } Note that this account still works if we change the order of the sentence to any configuration, we just need to reorder the merges.
aasasd 7y ago
I'm not a linguist and accordingly haven't read Chomsky proper, but let me take a stab from what I know: Chomsky isn't concerned with just grammar of written or spoken languages―instead he shows that these grammars map to a universal mental grammar. Different physical languages deal in different ways with constructs of the mental grammar: English expresses the same concepts and relations as inflections, but uses helper words for that. Correspondingly, where you build a grammar tree from words in English, you build it from roots and affixes in inflectional languages. There are languages in which a single word with a bunch of affixes equates to an English sentence. Regarding “expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation”: this should just translate straightforwardly to an implied subject. Even incomplete sentences in whatever language have their implied subjects, verbs and objects―usually deduced from previous speech. Pinker in ‘The Language Instinct’ has a great example of how casual speech is very compact compared to legalese writing where you have to explicitly write out everything in anticipation of ambiguities and adversarial reading. Chomsky also has a concept of ‘trace’ which is an ‘invisible’ word in a sentence and refers to a previously mentioned word. E.g. in “the spoon that I'm eating soup with,” there's a hidden member: “the spoon that I'm eating soup with <trace>,” and the trace refers to the spoon, helping to build the grammatical tree. I think this concept is hinted at in the article with Gaelic “caught boy caught fish.” Afaiu the ‘trace’ is different from sub-word and implied entities, but it helps to illustrate how the mental grammar isn't the same as written one.
- ajuc 7y ago
  > Regarding “expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation”: this should just translate straightforwardly to an implied subject. Yes you can express any set as a tree (in fact as many possible trees) but if different possible tree representations of that set are equally as valid - then the tree structure isn't really there, it's just an arbitrary interpretation imposed on the data. If a sentence A B C can be reordered to any permutation, and some parts can be dropped without changing the meaning - then what lets you decide that the proper representation is this tree: . / \ A . / \ B C and not this: . / \ . C / \ A B And if any of these is as valid as any other - why insist that the underlying structure is even a tree? Another hint that these kinds of interpretations are wrong is that most succesfull NLP software typically uses word vectors which ignore the tree-like structure and just treats the data as unordered set :) To understand a sentence it is more important to know all the words in it, than to know how they are nested. Even for analytical languages like English :)

by schoen 7y ago

JackFr 7y ago

Felt the same way. I'm not an expert on language by any stretch, but even I know the role of a noun in Latin is determined by its case rather than its position. Also is 'Merge' a thing? Or has the author just blessed his concept into proper noun-hood? It's not really explained.

aasasd 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(linguistics)
linguistbreaker 7y ago
For sure. Merge is the most basic primitive for creating metadata. If you are familiar with RDF, which uses Subect-Object-Predicate triples that's more similar to Chomsky's original X-bar theory which calls these triples Head-Complement-Specifier. The difference is that Merge sees the triple as a derivative of the merge primitive and X-bar sees the triple as the primitive. Both are about the fundamental nature of metadata or data linkage/relationships and how meaning is derived. Both can be applied mostly successfully down the layers of the language stack - semantics -> syntax -> morphology -> phonology -> phonetics.

eindiran 7y ago

Many linguists believe the same set of principles act on sub-word units, a theory called Distributed Morphology or DM[0] "'Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down' entails that elements within syntax and within morphology enter into the same types of constituent structures (such as can be diagrammed through binary branching trees). DM is piece-based in the sense that the elements of both syntax and of morphology are understood as discrete instead of as (the results of) morphophonological processes."[1] So a rather simplified way to think about it is that each word is a little mini-tree and Merge operations create a branching structure between its constituent parts. Each of those words is then part of the larger sentence-level tree. The important this is that Merge is acting on the units at both levels. Similarly, Merge can act on structures that are the output of previous Merges, allowing you to have a verb, in a particular conjugation (it's sub-word structure), that selects for a particular type of supra-word structure (a tree) that's headed by a noun with some set of features, eg a particular case. Another point that is kind of alluded to in the article is that you can create movement from one part of a tree to another with Merge. In previous theories of syntax, there always needed to be both something like Merge and a special "move" operation. But Merge simplifies things quite a bit in that regard. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_morphology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_morphology [1] https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/#how%20DM%20is%20different https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/#how%20DM%20is%20diffe...

schoen 7y ago
Whoa, that's amazing! Can you explain a little more about how something like an agreement rule would be analyzed in this framework? I suppose I didn't quite understand your "that selects for a particular type of super-word structure (a tree) that's headed by a noun with some set of features". Is this sort of akin to a type system in programming? Like the verb is only willing to bind with a subject noun phrase whose head has a particular feature?
- eindiran 7y ago
  In this framework, you can think about a morpheme as being a tuple of features. Like you said, it is sort of akin to a type system, where passing the wrong type to a function won't work. A morpheme will select for a feature or set of features from whatever its merged with, and won't merge with something it doesn't agree with. I think using a language which doesn't care much about word order will be illustrative here, so let's use Latin: puella vidit canem The girl sees the dog We can break this down into: puell - a vid - et can - em girl - NOM.S.FEM sees - S.3 dog - ACC.S.FEM So 'puella' is the tuple of features [+NOM, +S, +FEM], 'videt' is [+PRES, +ACTIVE, +S, +3], etc. Here, we want to do a Merge with 'puella' and 'videt': we say that 'puella' selects for the features +NOM, +3, +S (nominative, third person, and singular) in its verb, but doesn't care about the others. It can still agree with its verb if the verb is passive or in the past tense. But if a verb is conjugated in a way that violates the features it selects for (eg the verb is conjugated as first person plural), 'puella' won't merge with it. As you said, a phrase level structure will have the features of its constituent parts bubble up to it. So once we've done the first Merge with 'puella' and 'videt', our structure is now selecting for a noun phrase that has the feature +ACC. Because 'canem' meets this requirement, we can get the final Merge necessary for our finished sentence. { { puella, videt }, canem } Note that this account still works if we change the order of the sentence to any configuration, we just need to reorder the merges.

aasasd 7y ago

I'm not a linguist and accordingly haven't read Chomsky proper, but let me take a stab from what I know: Chomsky isn't concerned with just grammar of written or spoken languages―instead he shows that these grammars map to a universal mental grammar. Different physical languages deal in different ways with constructs of the mental grammar: English expresses the same concepts and relations as inflections, but uses helper words for that. Correspondingly, where you build a grammar tree from words in English, you build it from roots and affixes in inflectional languages. There are languages in which a single word with a bunch of affixes equates to an English sentence. Regarding “expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation”: this should just translate straightforwardly to an implied subject. Even incomplete sentences in whatever language have their implied subjects, verbs and objects―usually deduced from previous speech. Pinker in ‘The Language Instinct’ has a great example of how casual speech is very compact compared to legalese writing where you have to explicitly write out everything in anticipation of ambiguities and adversarial reading. Chomsky also has a concept of ‘trace’ which is an ‘invisible’ word in a sentence and refers to a previously mentioned word. E.g. in “the spoon that I'm eating soup with,” there's a hidden member: “the spoon that I'm eating soup with <trace>,” and the trace refers to the spoon, helping to build the grammatical tree. I think this concept is hinted at in the article with Gaelic “caught boy caught fish.” Afaiu the ‘trace’ is different from sub-word and implied entities, but it helps to illustrate how the mental grammar isn't the same as written one.

ajuc 7y ago
> Regarding “expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation”: this should just translate straightforwardly to an implied subject. Yes you can express any set as a tree (in fact as many possible trees) but if different possible tree representations of that set are equally as valid - then the tree structure isn't really there, it's just an arbitrary interpretation imposed on the data. If a sentence A B C can be reordered to any permutation, and some parts can be dropped without changing the meaning - then what lets you decide that the proper representation is this tree: . / \ A . / \ B C and not this: . / \ . C / \ A B And if any of these is as valid as any other - why insist that the underlying structure is even a tree? Another hint that these kinds of interpretations are wrong is that most succesfull NLP software typically uses word vectors which ignore the tree-like structure and just treats the data as unordered set :) To understand a sentence it is more important to know all the words in it, than to know how they are nested. Even for analytical languages like English :)