Showing papers in "Linguistics and Philosophy in 1985"

Evidence Against the Context-Freeness of Natural Language

Abstract: In searching for universal constraints on the class of natural languages, linguists have investigated a number of formal properties, including that of context-freeness. Soon after Chomsky’s categorization of languages into his well-known hierarchy (Chomsky, 1963), the common conception of the context-free class of languages as a tool for describing natural languages was that it was too restrictive a class — interpreted strongly (as a way of characterizing structure sets) and even weakly (as a way of characterizing string sets).

The Complexity of the Vocabulary of Bambara

Abstract: In this paper I look at the possibility of considering the vocabulary of a natural language as a sort of language itself. In particular, I study the weak generative capacity of the vocabulary of Bambara, and show that the vocabulary is not context free. This result has important ramifications for the theory of syntax of natural language.

On recent analyses of the semantics of control

Abstract: differ from that of (lc) and (Id) respectively: it is believed that a theory of so-called control2 of subjectless complements must describe how inter pretive inverses of the classical Equi and Raising transformations are to be performed, supplying a NP-meaning as semantic subject to the comple ment meaning for the Equi cases (la) and (lb), and \"moving\" the meaning of the matrix subject NP so that it plays the role of the subject of the complement meaning in (Ic) and (ld). On this view, the resulting compositional semantic structures of (la)-(ld) could be represented as (2a)-(2d) respectively, which I will refer to as the R-analysis of the semantics of infinitive complements, implying a compositional analysis of control. (R here stands for Rosenbaum, for I believe this analysis reflects an implicit semantic assumption that has been passed on, without much question, since the original syntactic analyses of Rosenbaum (1967).) For concreteness, these are formulated as expressions of Montague's in tensional logic, and are labeled with the logical types of their parts purely for reasons of perspicuity. Here, r(A) is the logical type corresponding to category A, and r(VP) = ((NP, r(S)), i.e., the type assignment of Mon tague's \"Universal Grammar\" is assumed (cf. ?1 below).

LFG and psychological explanation

Abstract: The publication of The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations (hereafter, MRGR)' is an important event for linguists and all concerned with the psychology of language. It provides the most definitive statement to date of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a theory of natural language grammar which is claimed to generalise across radically different language types, to be recursive, learnable, realistically parsable and producible, and to provide "a stronger basis than ever before for a psychologically realistic theory of grammar". The present paper begins by briefly reviewing the nature of the psychological problem, before outlining LFG as a theory of grammar in section 1.2 Section 2 then considers the broader psychological claim. Grammars of natural languages are psychologically problematic in at least two ways. The first is a major concern among linguists: natural language syntax is complicated by the inclusion of various startling discontinuous and fragmentary constituents, which occur for example in relative clauses and "reduced" coordinate sentences, Other less surprising constructions still tend to be characterised by a puzzling complexity in the relation between surface grammatical functions like subject and object and underlying semantic or thematic categories like agent and patient. Natural languages are also characterised by a surprising degree of syntactic ambiguity. In particular, points of "local" syntactic ambiguity, where it is locally unclear which of two or more analyses should be followed, are widespread, a fact which has led psychologists and com putational linguists to postulate processing regimes embodied in various algorithms and heuristic "strategies". The psychological implications of these two types of untoward complexity are serious, both for learning and processing. The two problems of grammar and local ambiguity resolution are logically quite separate. The former is a (partial) specification of WHAT is computed in natural language comprehension, whereas the latter relates to HOW it is computed. Since it is obvious that the space of algorithms for computing the relevant class of functions is very much larger than that class itself, there is an equally obvious methodological priority across the two problems: whether we count ourselves as psychologists or linguists, until the problem of grammar has been solved, we are unlikely to make much headway with the other problems of processing, such as local

The realist theory of meaning

Abstract: The most striking difference between the semantic theory embodied in Jon Barwise and John Perry's Situations and Attitudes and most variants of intensional semantics is the strict realism that situation semantics supports. In intensional semantics an expression has meaning and reference; reference is what it stands for; meaning is the way the reference is determined. This concept of meaning is essentially modal: to know the way the reference is determined is not being right all the time you come across a referent, but rather staying right when things change: a way of recognizing how things turn out in different possibilities. While in intensional semantics referents are (possible) individuals, relations and truthvalues, in situation semantics referents are actual courses of events, which specify which objects stand in certain relations at certain locations. Such courses of events can be classified by their parts, factual courses of events (a course of events in which John smokes and drinks is one in which John smokes), more abstractly by event types (it is a course of events in which someone smokes and drinks), and by schemata (it is a course of events in which someone smokes and drinks or someone is ill). Through this classification certain patterns can be recognized: courses of events contain information that is relevant for other courses of events, courses of events can be meaningful for other courses of events. The world consists of actual courses of events (and events that classify these); it respects certain constraints upon courses of events, which are themselves simply relations between courses of events. Organisms can be attuned to these constraints, and as such they give rise to meaning. Crucial is that situation semantics is not modal: meaning is a relation between actual courses of events, not between possibilities; organisms pick up meaning by repeatedly being confronted with constraints, not by evaluating alter natives. The world respects certain constraints and does not respect others. Now obviously, a distinction should be made between those constraints that can be regarded as natural laws, conventions, relations of linguistic meaning on the one hand, and accidental patterns that happen to hold on the other.