The Case for Case

Send me back to Ling-610 if you want, but I still find something fishy or funny about the claim that Case is a vacuous, meaningless item void of any interpretation whatsoever. We have to admit that there's a high coincidence in, especially more synthetic languages, Case marking and theta-role interpretation. In fact, the first thing I go to when learning a language is the Case system, as that's intrumental in expressing a thought (the second would be relative clause markers). Besides, is there anything that we could pinpoint as a theta-role marker aside from Case, or, in some languages word order, or in some languages, both? I dearly hope the point of disparaging Case marking is not to light a candle at the alter of the supremacy of word order; just because some languages like English don't have profligate Case marking doesn't mean that Case is worthless other than serving as something that allegedly drives syntactic process by serving to highlight the availablity of an alleged Goal. After all, in languages with free word order, Case marking is the only savior in decoding the object-action schemas. And please don't tell me that that device is better served by a 'scrambled' underlying word-order, as that just smacks of English hedgemony.

So, the point up to here is that Case and Theta seem to overlap quite a bit. As for the two distractors offered in class: ECM and Passive, I think they're trivial. For one, the passive is a marked form. In English, there's something about the + participle that tells you Case interpretation isn't what it normally is. There's a Passive marker in Arabic telling you the same thing. In German, too. Secondly, the fact that the Agent in the subordinate class of an ECM verb is marked with the Accusative form may only be a synchronic fact. Has anyone looked at the history of this construction? Funny things happen all the time in the course of language development. Greek (modern, I think) has no infinitive, but that doesn't mean the infinitive is a useless form; on the contrary, when Greek lost the final 'n' in cases, the infinitive looked identical to the third person singular. Consequently, people started to reinterpret the syntax of an control infinitivals. But the fact that Greek lacks an infinitive shouldn't be used as evidence for some theory, because it had an infinitive at some point. Perhaps the same holds with the English case.

As an endnote to all of this, I just discussed these views with a fellow linguist trained in the Generative tradition who also happens to have a PhD in theoretical syntax, and he agrees with the above argument. Why not send him back to Ling-610?

Statistics and the independence of syntax and semantics

I know we're moving on to animal communication, but I had a comment on last week's materials that I felt should be made. It seemed to me that the "take-away" lesson we converged on during the course of our discussion of the LSLT excerpts was that Markovian processes, whether hidden (over POS tags) , high order (lots of history), or both, were dismantled by Chomsky as implausible accounts of natural language phenomena. This is undoubtedly true, but not even remotely controversial for most folks who are interested in statistical models of language. What I thought was also quite evident from reading LSLT but wasn't really addressed was the fact that Chomsky also argues for independence of meaning and grammaticality (I know this sounds so obvious as to almost be another example of the inanity of people who "work on statistics"). However, the implications of this claim are actually extremely precise for any statistical model. Specifically, we know that the independence of two events A & B has the following properties:

1. P(A,B) = P(A)P(B)
2. P(A|B) = P(A)
3. P(B|A) = P(B)

Therefore, if we are interested in "grammaticality" and are working with a model which conflates meaning and grammaticality (ie, P(A,B)), we must immediately doubt whether we can really even address the later without factoring out the former. Conversely, if we have a model which predicts both, we would expect their relationship (if Chomsky is right) to conform approximately to the relationship expressed in (1).

Any thoughts? Did I miss something obvious?

Wouldn't it be Interesting......?

I for one would really like to see the HCF Hypothesis 3 proven wrong. That would be an interesting bit of happenstance. Perhaps we're so conditioned to believe that humans are the only ones lucky enough to indulge in linguistic behaviors that we're oblivious to what's actually going on in nature. Much like Jane Goodall's professor who was adamant that only humans solved problems with tools. So hence my inquiry about recursion. Are we sure birds lack it? I haven't studied this enough, so I don't know much of the facts, but I'd be happy to view them. On the other hand, I know it's probably difficult to deny that recursion obtains in language use (except maybe for the Piraha), but HCF did leave the door open to such a negation when claiming that that capacity may be a characteristic of other cognitive systems, such as navigation and social interpretation. Given this, might there not be minimally analogues of such a capability in other species? Other navigators or other beings that interact with others like themselves? I personally won't be so quick to write off birdsong to finite-state output, simply in deference to a theory, which is simply and only a theory. But maybe this is because I'd just be tickled to see it dashed in the name of science.

Thoughts on Evolution of Language Readings

So, I've read the Hauser/Chomsky/Fitch paper, and a few things struck me. For one, they claim that the language faculty, okay, syntax, is a (near) optimal mechanism for connecting the sensory motor system to the conceptual one. If true, why should displacement be a part of it?Why should recursion be a part of it? Ideas may be expressed in discrete units; the Piraha, in fact, may lack recursion altogether. Of course, at the end of the article, the authors claim that recursion may have evolved independently in a domain-general fashion, becoming specialized only later. I'm willing to accept this conclusion, but it says nothing on how our little group characterizes language. All of that is to say, then, supposed feature-checking mechanisms are optimal? For all our spouting of 'elegant rules', I would think a system without movement and D-features would be a better exemplar of the cleanliness of mental operations. I believe there are theories out there that do without movement, so maybe being an evolutionary linguist means taking a hard, difficult look at the level of theoretical complexity that we've devised.

Furthermore, if it turns out that recursion isn't a part of the language faculty (per the suggestion that it's used for other mental concerns, does this mean that birds also have language, albeit with a much reduced vocabulary? I believe the article said said that was a limiting factor to the classification of their abilities. Along this line, there is a professor at Duke who is studying songbird neurolgy in order to decode how language is learned, eventually applying it to human nuerobiology:

Department of Neurobiology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA
Address for correspondence: Eric D. Jarvis, Department of Neurology, Duke University Medical Center, Box 3209, Durham, NC 27710, USA. Voice: 919-681-1680; fax: 919-681-08772. jarvis@neuro.duke.edu

http://www.jarvislab.net/
Vocal learning, the substrate for human language, is a rare trait found to date in only three distantly related groups of mammals (humans, bats, and cetaceans) and three distantly related groups of birds (parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds). Brain pathways for vocal learning have been studied in the three bird groups and in humans. Here I present a hypothesis on the relationships and evolution of brain pathways for vocal learning among birds and humans. The three vocal learning bird groups each appear to have seven similar but not identical cerebral vocal nuclei distributed into two vocal pathways, one posterior and one anterior. Humans also appear to have a posterior vocal pathway, which includes projections from the face motor cortex to brainstem vocal lower motor neurons, and an anterior vocal pathway, which includes a strip of premotor cortex, the anterior basal ganglia, and the anterior thalamus. These vocal pathways are not found in vocal non-learning birds or mammals, but are similar to brain pathways used for other types of learning. Thus, I argue that if vocal learning evolved independently among birds and humans, then it did so under strong genetic constraints of a pre-existing basic neural network of the vertebrate brain.

Reactions to September 19 class

Ok, my first reaction: Whew! As in, "Whew, it's over..." :-)

Seriously, though, I appreciate the really useful discussion. Which has two readings, doesn't it: "I appreciate the (entire) discussion, which was really useful", versus "I appreciate the useful subset of the discussion (in contrast with the useless bits). I meant the former.

That's all from me for now. I'm looking forward to seeing how the discussion progress.

That function

Mwaha. I have been given the keys to the kingdom. Nothing can stop me now!

So, I get that we're now sort of converging on the idea that we want to characterize human language as a function from some set of representations to some form of kind-of-sort-of set membership measure---e.g. (PF, LF) -> {0,1} or (numeration, PF, LF) -> [0,1] or whatever.

But something has often struck me as a little odd when we go this route. It doesn't seem to have that much to do with the machinery of linguistic computation. If we worry whether there is an equivalence between the kind of memory that a Turing Machine has and the kind that the brain has, well, it seems that the machinery of linguistic computation is of central importance. So why aren't we instead characterizing the function as two (potentially inverse) functions: PF->LF (parsing) and LF->PF (generation), rather than attempting to characterize grammaticality judgements on (PF, LF) pairs?

Or am I missing something fundamental, it's late and I'm just wooly-headed, etc, etc?

Plans for September 19 class

I've added details for next class, including readings, on the schedule. In addition to requiring Abney (thanks, Tim, for posting the links!), I recommend Manning and Sorace/Keller.

Steven Abney paper for 19 September

http://www.vinartus.net/spa/95c.pdf

Also in the locker here:
http://www.ling.umd.edu/locker/ComputationsOfLanguage/Abney95c.pdf

Reactions to Class 2 and to reading for Class 3

The title says it all....I've posted some comments on the initial 'Reactions to Class 1 and Reading for class 2' and simply didn't think of initiating the post.

August 29 class -- reactions after class

Well, I was really pleased with how things went! People had very interesting things to say, and I felt as if the mix (computational, linguistic, etc.) was a good one.

Here are the pointers to the papers from today:

Marr, David. Vision. W.H. Freeman, 1982
http://web.archive.org/web/20051227154554/http://www.psych.upenn.edu/backuslab/psyc111/Readings/Marr_Chapter1.pdf

Kosslyn, S. M., and Maljkovic, V. (1990). Marr's metatheory revisited. Concepts in Neuroscience, 1, 239-251.
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~kwn/Kosslyn_pdfs/1990Kosslyn_ConceptsInNeurosci1_MarrMetatheory.pdf

Folks should comment on this posting in order to create their after-class reaction pieces.

For next class (and the one after), these readings are worth looking at:

"Turing Machine", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/

Big-O Notation, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation

Optionally,

"Church-Turing Thesis", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/

"Computational Theory of Mind", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/

There will soon be a posting of a pointer to a PDF file for Howard's readings.

How to post reactions

I think it would make sense for each class session to have a single blog posting that includes everyone's reactions before and after as comments. Whoever gets there first can get the honor of creating the initial posting, and everyone else can add comments (and comments on comments, etc.) after that.

Chris and I will show you an example in a second...

(Of course, please also feel free to do fresh new postings on other related topics if you are inspired to so so.)

Welcome to The Computations of Language!

Ok, so we're going to try out Chris's suggestion and see how a blogging setup works as a communication mechanism for the class -- at least in terms of people's reactions and discussion. I'll also set up a regular old mailing list for class announcements, and I'll make sure to quickly provide pointers to the syllabus, readings, etc.

In terms of structure, just a reminder that Juan and I would like folks to now enter the virtuous cycle of (a) reacting to the previous class, (b) doing the readings for the next class, (c) reacting to the readings by, say, 5pm Tuesdays, (d) reading everyone's reactions in advance, (e) optionally returning to step d and reacting to people's reactions, (f) ... ok, you get the idea. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. (I don't think I would have written that if this were not a blog. Hmmm, wonder what this medium does to people...)

As always, also please feel free to e-mail Juan and/or me privately with any concerns, issues, discussions, etc.