- Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, Social cognition (Psychology), Language evolution and development, Origins of Language, Language Evolution, and 18 moreLanguages and Linguistics, Psychology, English, Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Sociolinguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Philosophy Of Language, Cognitive Neuroscience, Historical Linguistics, Morphology, Computer Science, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Embodiment, Gesture, Cultural Evolution, and Language Originsedit
This paper uncovers how metaphor forces argument overtnessacross languages and parts of speech. It addresses the relationship between semantically unsaturated terms, functors, and the argument terms that complete them. When the component... more
This paper uncovers how metaphor forces argument overtnessacross languages and parts of speech. It addresses the relationship between semantically unsaturated terms, functors, and the argument terms that complete them. When the component terms' default senses clash semantically, a metaphor arises. In such cases, the argument must be overt, in contrast to literal uses. It is possible to say Everyone was waiting at the hotel. Finally, Kim arrived. By contrast, people do not use arrived metaphorically without a goal argument: Everything had been pointing to that conclusion all along. *Finally, Kim arrived. What they say is Finally, Kim arrived at it. We illustrate the phenomenon with powerful and diverse evidence: three corpus studies (Indo-Aryan languages, British English, Vera'a) and a sentence-completion experiment with around 250 native speakers of English. Both the corpus studies and the experiment show no or almost no exceptions to metaphor-driven argument overtness. The strength of the effect contrasts with a complete lack of speaker awareness. We propose that metaphor-driven argument overtnessas well as the lack of speaker consciousnessis a universal phenomenon that can be accounted for in terms of human language processing.
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One of the great unknowns in language evolution is the transition from unstructured sign combination to grammatical structure. This paper investigates the central — while hitherto overlooked — role of functor–argument metaphor. This type... more
One of the great unknowns in language evolution is the transition from unstructured sign combination to grammatical structure. This paper investigates the central — while hitherto overlooked — role of functor–argument metaphor. This type of meta- phor pervades modern language, but is absent in animal communication. It arises from the semantic clash between the default meanings of terms. Functor–argument metaphor became logically possible in protolanguage once sufficient vocabulary and basic compositionality arose, allowing for novel combinations of terms. For exam- ple, the verb to hide, a functor, could be combined not only with a concrete, spatial entity like food as its argument, but also with an abstract, non-spatial one like anger. Through this clash, to hide is reinterpreted as a metaphorical action. Functor–argu- ment metaphor requires the possibility of term combinability and the existence of compositionality. At the same time, it transcends compositionality, forcing a non- literal interpretation. We argue that functor–argument metaphor led the develop- ment of protolanguage into fully-fledged language in multiple ways. Not only did it expand expressiveness, but it drove the development of syntax including the con- ventionalization and fixation of word order, and the development of demonstratives. Thus, functor–argument metaphor fills in multiple gaps in the trajectory from a pro- tolanguage, with only some terms and simple term combinations, to the elaborate grammatical structures of fully-fledged human languages.
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ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important... more
ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important role in creating such communication systems from scratch. We then consider how iconic signs tend to become simplified and symbolic as the communication system matures and argue that this process is driven by repeated interactive use of the signs. We then consider evidence for iconicity at the level of the system in graphical communication and finally draw comparisons between iconicity in graphical and gestural communication systems and in spoken language.
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ABSTRACT this report I present an algorithm for finding planar segregations of phonemes for particular languages. This algorithm requires no domain-specific knowledge of phonology or phonetics. Despite this lack of knowledge, the... more
ABSTRACT this report I present an algorithm for finding planar segregations of phonemes for particular languages. This algorithm requires no domain-specific knowledge of phonology or phonetics. Despite this lack of knowledge, the implemented algorithm has identified the structurally significant segregations for thirty languages
This study presents the first acoustic description of the vowel space of a Papuan language – Nambo, spoken in southern Papua New Guinea – based on duration and first and second formant measurements from 19 adult male and female speakers... more
This study presents the first acoustic description of the vowel space of a Papuan language – Nambo, spoken in southern Papua New Guinea – based on duration and first and second formant measurements from 19 adult male and female speakers across three age groups (young, middle-aged, senior). Phonemically, Nambo has six full vowels /i, e, æ, ɑ, o, u/ and a reduced vowel tentatively labeled /ə/. Unlike the full vowels, the quality of /ə/ showed great variation: seniors’ and young females’ realizations tended to be more open and retracted than those by young males, while middle-aged speakers’ productions fell between these two variants.
Research Interests: Languages and Linguistics, Phonology, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics, Speech Sciences, and 12 moreSociophonetics, Linguistics, Speech Communication, Fieldwork in linguistics, Papua New Guinea, Acoustic Phonetics, Papuan linguistics, Speech, Experimental Phonetics, Papuan Languages, Vowels, and Field linguistics
In this paper, I propose a neurophysiologically plausible account for the evolution of arbitrary, categorical mental relationships. Topographic, or structure-preserving, mappings are widespread within animal brains. If they can be shown... more
In this paper, I propose a neurophysiologically plausible account for the evolution of arbitrary, categorical mental relationships. Topographic, or structure-preserving, mappings are widespread within animal brains. If they can be shown to generate behaviours in simulation, it is plausible that they are responsible for them in vivo. One behaviour has puzzled philosophers, psychologists and linguists alike: the categorical nature of language and its arbitrary associations between categories of form and meaning. I show here that arbitrary categorical relationships can arise when a topographic mapping is developed between continuous, but uncorrelated activation spaces. This is shown first by simulation, then identified in humans with synaesthesia. The independence of form and meaning as sensory or conceptual spaces automatically results in a categorial structure being imposed on each, as our brains attempt to link the spaces with topographic maps. This result suggests a neurophysiologically plausible explanation of categorisation in language.
How does modality affect people's ability to create a communication system from scratch? The present study experimentally tests this question by having pairs of participants communicate a range of pre-specified items (emotions, actions,... more
How does modality affect people's ability to create a communication system from scratch? The present study experimentally tests this question by having pairs of participants communicate a range of pre-specified items (emotions, actions, objects) over a series of trials to a partner using either non-linguistic vocalization, gesture or a combination of the two. Gesture-alone outperformed vocalization-alone, both in terms of successful communication and in terms of the creation of an inventory of sign-meaning mappings shared within a dyad (i.e., sign alignment). Combining vocalization with gesture did not improve performance beyond gesture-alone. In fact, for action items, gesture-alone was a more successful means of communication than the combined modalities. When people do not share a system for communication they can quickly create one, and gesture is the best means of doing so.
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Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolution are not well understood. Against a baseline that communication variants spread in a population following neutral evolutionary... more
Human communication systems evolve culturally, but the evolutionary mechanisms that drive this evolution are not well understood. Against a baseline that communication variants spread in a population following neutral evolutionary dynamics (also known as drift models), we tested the role of two cultural selection models: coordination- and content-biased. We constructed a parametrized mixed probabilistic model of the spread of communicative variants in four 8-person laboratory micro-societies engaged in a simple communication game. We found that selectionist models, working in combination, explain the majority of the empirical data. The best-fitting parameter setting includes an egocentric bias and a content bias, suggesting that participants retained their own previously used communicative variants unless they encountered a superior (content-biased) variant, in which case it was adopted. This novel pattern of results suggests that (i) a theory of the cultural evolution of human communication systems must integrate selectionist models and (ii) human communication systems are functionally adaptive complex systems.
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This study examines the intergenerational transfer of human communication systems. It tests if human communication systems evolve to be easy to learn or easy to use (or both), and how population size affects learnability and usability.... more
This study examines the intergenerational transfer of human communication systems. It tests if human communication systems evolve to be easy to learn or easy to use (or both), and how population size affects learnability and usability. Using an experimental-semiotic task, we find that human communication systems evolve to be easier to use (production efficiency and reproduction fidelity), but harder to learn (identification accuracy) for a second generation of naïve participants. Thus, usability trumps learnability. In addition, the communication systems that evolve in larger populations exhibit distinct advantages over those that evolve in smaller populations: the learnability loss (from the Initial signs) is more muted and the usability benefits are more pronounced. The usability benefits for human communication systems that evolve in a small and large population is explained through guided variation reducing sign complexity. The enhanced performance of the communication systems that evolve in larger populations is explained by the operation of a content bias acting on the larger pool of competing signs. The content bias selects for information-efficient iconic signs that aid learnability and enhance usability.
Shieber (1987) describes a technique for limiting the number of active edges introduced into a chart by top-down prediction in chart parsers for PATR grammars, without affecting the correctness or completeness of the parser. That... more
Shieber (1987) describes a technique for limiting the number of active edges introduced into a chart by top-down prediction in chart parsers for PATR grammars, without affecting the correctness or completeness of the parser. That technique, termed restriction, is extendable to other parsing algorithms. It can be employed to increase parsing efficiency and to induce termination for some classes of grammars that would not otherwise terminate.
Here, we describe one class of grammars for which restriction, as described by Shieber, induces non-termination. We do not suggest that the concept of restriction is fatally flawed, however. On the contrary, relatively minor modifications to the implementation of restriction can make it a more flexible tool for fine-tuning PATR grammars.
Here, we describe one class of grammars for which restriction, as described by Shieber, induces non-termination. We do not suggest that the concept of restriction is fatally flawed, however. On the contrary, relatively minor modifications to the implementation of restriction can make it a more flexible tool for fine-tuning PATR grammars.
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Stabler (1984) attacks generative models of language acquisition for relying on the psychologically implau- sible basis of simplicity for grammar selection. In this paper I argue that simplicity judgements can be of- fered a... more
Stabler (1984) attacks generative models of language acquisition for relying on the psychologically implau- sible basis of simplicity for grammar selection. In this paper I argue that simplicity judgements can be of- fered a psychologically plausible basis. First, a ca- pacity for simplicity judgements is equated with the ability to model a distribution. This ability, in turn, is shown to be one of the capabilities of self-organising maps. These, I argue, are neurologically, and hence psychologically, plausible.
According to the front page, Archangeli & Langendoen's Optimality Theory : an overview (henceforth A&L) is 'the first in a series of volumes of essays which are designed to introduce and... more
According to the front page, Archangeli & Langendoen's Optimality Theory : an overview (henceforth A&L) is 'the first in a series of volumes of essays which are designed to introduce and explain major research areas in linguistic theory and practice'. On the back cover, we learn that it provides 'the first general introduction to optimality theory – arguably the linguistic theory of the s'. And the Foreword states that the intended audience is 'anyone with a serious interest in language who desires to understand [Optimality Theory], regardless of their ...
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ABSTRACT Our perceptions are often logically compatible with abstractions we would never imagine entertaining. The problem of induction is to account for this disparity: how does evidence confirm one generalisation to the exclusion of... more
ABSTRACT Our perceptions are often logically compatible with abstractions we would never imagine entertaining. The problem of induction is to account for this disparity: how does evidence confirm one generalisation to the exclusion of others with which it is also logically compatible? In particular, how do we justify uniformity, the claim that the future will be like the past? This paper introduces the problem of induction, and then proposes a solution based on similarity measures and topographic mapping. The premisses of this solution are the following. (i) All variation occurs in in a context of non-trivial similarity structures. (ii) Natural cognitive mappings between spaces of representation are topographic mappings, maximally preserving the similarity structures. The uniformity presumption can be justified by these two premisses. In this paper, I explore a new account for the difference between logical compatibility and inductive confirmation. It has been known for a long tim...
From the earliest days of generative grammar, developing a general method for grammar acquisition has been a major goal of linguistic theory. Chomsky (1975) proposed that grammars be selected for their simplicity: the simplest grammar... more
From the earliest days of generative grammar, developing a general method for grammar acquisition has been a major goal of linguistic theory. Chomsky (1975) proposed that grammars be selected for their simplicity: the simplest grammar which fits the data is the best one. At that time, no computationally useful definition of simplicity has been available. Recently, the method variously known as minimum message length or minimum description length has proved very successful in selecting between hypotheses.
This paper presents a simplicity measure for violable phonological constraints based on the minimum message length method. This measure captures the intuitive desiderata of conciseness, accuracy and precision. A family of constraints can be specified by parameterising a specific constraint, and so forming a template. The combination of this measure with a search algorithm is a powerful learning method for finding the best constraint matching a template and fitting a corpus. This method may be applied iteratively, using the same template, to learn a number of different constraints. Five applications of an implementation show some of the successes of this learning method: from learning consonant cluster constraints to vowel harmony.
(NB This pdf was formatted for submission to Computational Linguistics, so early versions had a (C) ACL notice. It was never published in that journal.)
This paper presents a simplicity measure for violable phonological constraints based on the minimum message length method. This measure captures the intuitive desiderata of conciseness, accuracy and precision. A family of constraints can be specified by parameterising a specific constraint, and so forming a template. The combination of this measure with a search algorithm is a powerful learning method for finding the best constraint matching a template and fitting a corpus. This method may be applied iteratively, using the same template, to learn a number of different constraints. Five applications of an implementation show some of the successes of this learning method: from learning consonant cluster constraints to vowel harmony.
(NB This pdf was formatted for submission to Computational Linguistics, so early versions had a (C) ACL notice. It was never published in that journal.)
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
All languages make the same phonological generalisations. This is the remarkable claim of Optimality Theory (OT). In early generative phonology (Chomsky & Halle 1968) modelling languages with a xed same set of rewrite... more
All languages make the same phonological generalisations. This is the remarkable claim of Optimality Theory (OT). In early generative phonology (Chomsky & Halle 1968) modelling languages with a xed same set of rewrite rules was inconceivable. While not theoretically ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Phonetics, Cognition, Visual perception, and 16 moreVocabulary, Reading, Laterality, Language, Vision, Brain, Humans, Psychological, Word Recognition, Word, Visual Word Recognition, Positional information, Visual Field, Process Model, Visual Fixation, and Functional Laterality
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* Robots who read grammars * Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes, Nathaniel L. Blackbourne, Thomas J. Bott, Jacqueline Cook, T. Mark Ellison, Jordan Hollis, Edith E. Kirlew, Genevieve C. Richards, Sanle Zhao, Erich R. Round Poster presented at... more
* Robots who read grammars *
Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes, Nathaniel L. Blackbourne, Thomas J. Bott, Jacqueline Cook, T. Mark Ellison, Jordan Hollis, Edith E. Kirlew, Genevieve C. Richards, Sanle Zhao, Erich R. Round
Poster presented at CoEDL Fest 2017, Alexandra Park Conference Centre, Alexandra Headlands, QLD, Australia. Hosted by the University of Queensland. 6 February 2017.
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4625248
* Abstract *
Linguistic typology has yet to undergo a computational revolution like that seen in other scientific endeavours. Nevertheless, we could soon be able to query the entire store of published knowledge on human languages when we do our research. To do so, knowledge must be represented in a machine-readable format. Here, we introduce a prototype ‘Grammar Harvester’, a set of processes for creating richly annotated, machine-readable versions of existing grammatical descriptions, starting from a scanned PDF. Further, we introduce ‘Finder’ and ‘Analyser’ Robots, scripts which automatically identify and compile information from harvested grammars using novel and existing ontologies of linguistic concepts.
* Author bio *
Jayden Macklin-Cordes is a PhD candidate at the Ancient Language Lab, University of Queensland. He is the lead investigator on CoEDL Transdisciplinary and Innovation Grant, 'A "data well" prototype for Sahul phonologies'. Erich Round (Ancient Language Lab director, UQ) and Mark Ellison (ANU) are collaborators on the same grant. Working hard on the project are Summer Research Scholars Sanle Zhao, Edith Kirlew, Thomas Bott and Nathaniel Blackbourne (all UQ), with further generous assistance from research assistants Genevieve Richards, Jordan Hollis, and Jacqueline Cook (all UQ).
Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes, Nathaniel L. Blackbourne, Thomas J. Bott, Jacqueline Cook, T. Mark Ellison, Jordan Hollis, Edith E. Kirlew, Genevieve C. Richards, Sanle Zhao, Erich R. Round
Poster presented at CoEDL Fest 2017, Alexandra Park Conference Centre, Alexandra Headlands, QLD, Australia. Hosted by the University of Queensland. 6 February 2017.
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4625248
* Abstract *
Linguistic typology has yet to undergo a computational revolution like that seen in other scientific endeavours. Nevertheless, we could soon be able to query the entire store of published knowledge on human languages when we do our research. To do so, knowledge must be represented in a machine-readable format. Here, we introduce a prototype ‘Grammar Harvester’, a set of processes for creating richly annotated, machine-readable versions of existing grammatical descriptions, starting from a scanned PDF. Further, we introduce ‘Finder’ and ‘Analyser’ Robots, scripts which automatically identify and compile information from harvested grammars using novel and existing ontologies of linguistic concepts.
* Author bio *
Jayden Macklin-Cordes is a PhD candidate at the Ancient Language Lab, University of Queensland. He is the lead investigator on CoEDL Transdisciplinary and Innovation Grant, 'A "data well" prototype for Sahul phonologies'. Erich Round (Ancient Language Lab director, UQ) and Mark Ellison (ANU) are collaborators on the same grant. Working hard on the project are Summer Research Scholars Sanle Zhao, Edith Kirlew, Thomas Bott and Nathaniel Blackbourne (all UQ), with further generous assistance from research assistants Genevieve Richards, Jordan Hollis, and Jacqueline Cook (all UQ).