zompist bboard

Having seen Everett discuss these things first hand, and discuss the Piraha as a culture, I can say he's full of contradictory twaddle. He will in one sentence make some big claim about them not having mythology and never talking about things they've never seen, then mention their origin myths. He'l...

Well, here's an effect that I do believe in. If you're watching a scene with the intention of describing it in Language X, you'll attend to those features of the scene that Language X prefers to encode. Since attention in turn affects memory, this has long-lasting effects on what aspects of the sce...

Some terminological difficulties: 1. Define "scale" when it comes to a thought. I don't know how to tell a 'big' thought from a 'small' thought. Your question appear to be "does anyone believe that language influences thought except for in any way in which we know language influences thought?" Well...

Does anyone here belief that language influences thought on a macroscale, i.e. not merely in EEG readouts, or millisecond-differences in button pressing response times, etc? If your answer is yes, what is an example of this macroscale influence (what language feature and what macroscale thought/beha...

So how do you pick what statistic you're going to use? I would imagine that some methods would have more accurate results for certain types of languages. ... This is the subject of natural language processing. There is no right answer, there are just better answers. If you go onto the ACM Portal we...

Well, with regards to "being indebted to generative grammar", its important to point out that HPSG, LFG, CCG, etc. are all generative grammar, they're just not transformational, broadly speaking. The more functionalist grammars aren't, tho, thos is definitely true.

Are there any language-determiners that use a method as straightforward and logical as simply looking small words that are extremely common in certain languages? I mean, if a sample contains a lot of "and", "the", "this", "is", it's probably English, and there are certainly other sets of such words...

... There are other methods as well, even just using bigrams. For instance, you can build a hidden Markov model over the bigrams, then you can calculate the probabilities assigned to the query string according to each Markov model. This differences from Phar's vector angle model in that it can take...

I actually think that if there's a universal order of constituents, it's not as rigid as cartography supposes, but also that its origins are in the semantics, so that it's not so much part of UG but rather an emergent phenomena that results from UG + structure of semantic objects. But then, I also t...

I take it that you are familiar with Marit Julien's PhD dissertation? Because she tried to see if the combination of the Cartographic approach to verbal functional categories, combined with Kayne's antisymmetry combined with "all morphology is in the syntax" approach is viable from a typological po...

Well, if you'd be more specific about what you're looking for, maybe some of us would you able to provide you with specific examples or counterexamples from languages we're familiar with? "a good resource on verb morphology cross linguistically, or, perhaps more usefully, a corpus that has glosses ...

It has a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth - there is an example sentance of most kinds of morphology, but only one of each. I'll take a look. I need as many examples of verbs with multiple inflections as possible. Basically I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm claims about the universal orderin...

Payne: Describing Morphosyntax? How comprehensive is it? I want as many example sentences as humanly possible (tens to hundreds of thousands, if possible), or barring that, a reliably complete description (tho I'd really prefer raw data if possible). Say three hundred thousand examples, for, say, f...

Radagast wrote:Payne: Describing Morphosyntax?

How comprehensive is it? I want as many example sentences as humanly possible (tens to hundreds of thousands, if possible), or barring that, a reliably complete description (tho I'd really prefer raw data if possible).

Does anyone know of a good resource on verb morphology cross linguistically, or, perhaps more usefully, a corpus that has glosses for many non-English languages?

You might want to check out some of the formal semantics literature on aspect, this comes up quite a bit. I believe the sort of generalization that they have is that if you have some sort of plurality of events that constitute a non-singular event (e.g. running, in which parts constitute running as ...

For sentence complexity, look into things like extraction islands, quantificational structures, and comparative structures. They all involve wonderfully interesting complexities.

Do Language Change Rates Depend on Population Size?

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My god! The 12 part! GPSG! ::dies: This is probably the most acceptable sort of theory for people here. It's pretty much just a formalization of things like agreement and "extraction" in a way that sounds a lot like how we normally talk (so and so agrees with blah dee blah ~> agreement features of s...

LFG is up: Lexical-Functional Grammar

If you really believe in the existence of purely grammatical functions like subject and object, LFG is probably more your kind of framework.

we've had huge arguments over this before but that title's sort of inaccurate you should instead say "Generative Grammar" there, because otherwise you're implying that you're writing about the development of grammar as a component of language which is both misleading, and in my snot-nosed opinion r...

New part, a week late:

Tree-adjoining Grammar

After this we get into the more heavy hitting models that have very complicated structures, so if you're need to, brush up on the formal grammar stuff from earlier, it'll be helpful.

And now for something completely different

Part 9 - Categorial Grammar (CG) and Combinator Categorial Grammar (CCG)

Part 8 - Generative Semantics (GS)

If you're still reading.

Part 7, Minimalist Program is now up. Of all the core Chomskyan theories, this is the one to understand.