Productivity and reuse in language : a theory of linguistic computation and storage / Timothy J. O'Donnell.

9780262326803 (electronic bk.)
0262326809 (electronic bk.)
0262028840
9780262028844

Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : The MIT Press, [2015]

©2015

English

1 online resource (xii, 337 pages) : illustrations

P37.5.M46 O36 2015eb

410.1/51

"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 probabilistic 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"--MIT CogNet.

Access limited to authorized users.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

Online Access through The MIT Press Direct
OCLC metadata license agreement

Online Resources > Ebooks
All Resources