Language. An introduction to the study of speech

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Graph Theory and Universal Grammar

Tese arquivada ao abrigo da Portaria nº 227/2017 de 25 de Julho-Registo de Grau EstrangeiroIn the last few years, Noam Chomsky (1994; 1995; 2000; 2001) has gone quite far in the direction of simplifying syntax, including eliminating X-bar theory and the levels of D-structure and S-structure entirely, as well as reducing movement rules to a combination of the more primitive operations of Copy and Merge. What remain in the Minimalist Program are the operations Merge and Agree and the levels of LF (Logical Form) and PF (Phonological form). My doctoral thesis attempts to offer an economical theory of syntactic structure from a graph-theoretic point of view (cf. Diestel, 2005), with special emphases on the elimination of category and projection labels and the Inclusiveness Condition (Chomsky 1994). The major influences for the development of such a theory have been Chris Collins’ (2002) seminal paper “Eliminating labels”, John Bowers (2001) unpublished manuscript “Syntactic Relations” and the Cartographic Paradigm (see Belletti, Cinque and Rizzi’s volumes on OUP for a starting point regarding this paradigm). A syntactic structure will be regarded here as a graph consisting of the set of lexical items, the set of relations among them and nothing more

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

Grounding the Linking Competence in Culture and Nature. How Action and Perception Shape the Syntax-Semantics Relationship

Part I of the book presents my basic assumptions about the syntax-semantics relationship as a competence of language users and compares them with those of the two paradigms that presently account for most theoretical linguistic projects, studies, and publications. I refer to them as Chomskyan Linguistics and Cognitive-Functional Linguistics. I will show that these approaches do not provide the means to accommodate the sociocultural origins of the “linking” competence, creating the need for an alternative approach. While considering these two approaches (sections 2.1 and 2.3), an alternative proposal will be sketched in section 2.2, using the notion of “research programme”. Thus, part I deals mainly with questions of the philosophy of science. Nevertheless, the model underlying the research programme gives structure to the procedure followed throughout the rest of the book, since it identifies the undertaking as multidisciplinary, following from the central roles of perception and action/attribution. This means that approaching the competence of relating form to content as characterized above requires looking into these sub-competences first, since the former draws upon the latter. Part I concludes with the formulation of an action-theoretic vocabulary and taxonomy (section 2.4). This vocabulary serves as the guideline for how to talk about the subject-matter of each of these disciplines. Part II and chapter 3 then deal with the sub-competences that have been identified as underlying linguistic competence. They concern the use of perception, identification/categorization, conceptualization, action, attribution, and the use of linguistic symbols. Section 3.1 in part II deals with perception. In particular, two crucial properties of perception will be discussed: that it consists of a bottom-up part and a top-down part, and that the output of perception is underspecified in the sense that what we perceive is not informative with respect to actional, i.e., socially relevant matters. The sections on perception to some degree anticipate the characterization of conceptualization in section 3.2 because the latter will be reconstructed as simulated perception. The property of underspecification is thus sustained in conceptualization, too. If utterances encode concepts and concepts are underspecified with respect to those matters that are most important for everyday interaction, one wonders how verbal interaction can (actually) be successful. Here is where action competence and attribution come into play (the non-conceptual contents referred to above). I will show that native speakers act and cognize according to particular socio-cognitive parameters, on the basis of which they make socially relevant attributions. These in turn specify what was underspecified about concepts beforehand. In other words, actional knowledge including attribution must complement concepts in order to count as the semantics underlying linguistic utterances. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 develop a descriptive means for semantic contents. I present the inherent structural organization of concepts and demonstrate how the spatial and temporal aspects of conceptualization can be systematically related to the syntactic structures underlying utterances. In particular, I will argue that conceptualization is organized by means of trajector-landmark configurations which can quite regularly be related to parts of speech in syntactic constructions using the notion of diagrammatic iconicity. Given a diagrammatic mapping and conceptualization as simulated perception the utterance thus becomes something like an instruction to simulate a perception. In part III, section 4.1 deals with the question of what the formal constituents of utterances/constructions contribute to the building of a concept from an utterance. In this context a theory of the German dative is presented, based on the theoretical notions developed throughout this work. Section 4.2 sketches the non-formal properties that reduce the remaining underspecification. In this context one of the most fundamental cognitive properties of language users is uncovered, namely their need to find the cause of any event they are cognizing about. I will then outline the consequences of this property for language production and comprehension. Section 4.3 lists the most important linking schemas for German on the basis of the most important constructions, i.e., motivated conceptualization-syntactic construction mappings, and then describes in a step-by-step manner how – from the utterance-as-instruction-for-conceptualization perspective – such an instruction is obeyed, and how such an instruction is built up from the perception of an event, respectively. The last section, 4.4, is dedicated to a discussion of some of the most famous and most puzzling linguistic phenomena which theoretical linguists traditionally deal with. In discussing the formal aspects of the linguistic competence, examples from German are used

The Evolution of Language Universals: Optimal Design and Adaptation

Inquiry into the evolution of syntactic universals is hampered by severe limitations on the available evidence. Theories of selective function nevertheless lead to predictions of local optimaliiy that can be tested scientifically. This thesis refines a diagnostic, originally proposed by Parker and Maynard Smith (1990), for identifying selective functions on this basis and applies it to the evolution of two syntactic universals: (I) the distinction between open and closed lexical classes, and (2) nested constituent structure. In the case of the former, it is argued that the selective role of the closed class items is primarily to minimise the amount of redundancy in the lexicon. In the case of the latter, the emergence of nested phrase structure is argued to have been a by-product of selection for the ability to perform insertion operations on sequences - a function that plausibly pre-dated the emergence of modem language competence. The evidence for these claims is not just that these properties perform plausibly fitness-related functions, but that they appear to perform them in a way that is improbably optimal. A number of interesting findings follow when examining the selective role of the closed classes. In particular, case, agreement and the requirement that sentences have subjects are expected consequences of an optimised lexicon, the theory thereby relating these properties to natural selection for the first time. It also motivates the view that language variation is confined to parameters associated with closed class items, in turn explaining why parameter confiicts fail to arise in bilingualism. The simplest representation of sequences that is optimised for efficient insertions can represent both nested constituent structure and long-distance dependencies in a unified way, thus suggesting that movement is intrinsic to the representation of constituency rather than an 'imperfection'. The basic structure of phrases also follows from this representation and helps to explain the interaction between case and theta assignment. These findings bring together a surprising array of phenomena, reinforcing its correctness as the representational basis of syntactic structures. The diagnostic overcomes shortcomings in the approach of Pinker and Bloom (1990), who argued that the appearance of 'adaptive complexity' in the design of a trait could be used as evidence of its selective function, but there is no reason to expect the refinements of natural selection to increase complexity in any given case. Optimality considerations are also applied in this thesis to filter theories of the nature of unobserved linguistic representations as well as theories of their functions. In this context, it is argued that, despite Chomsky's (1995) resistance to the idea, it is possible to motivate the guiding principles of the Minimalist Program in terms of evolutionary optimisation, especially if we allow the possibility that properties of language were selected for non-communicative functions and that redundancy is sometimes costly rather than beneficial