46,768 research outputs found
Generative grammar
Generative Grammar is the label of the most influential research program in linguistics and related fields in the second half of the 20. century. Initiated by a short book, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), it became one of the driving forces among the disciplines jointly called the cognitive sciences. The term generative grammar refers to an explicit, formal characterization of the (largely implicit) knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior. The program had a strong mentalist orientation right from the beginning, documented e.g. in a fundamental critique of Skinner's Verbal behavior (1957) by Chomsky (1959), arguing that behaviorist stimulus-response-theories could in no way account for the complexities of ordinary language use. The "Generative Enterprise", as the program was called in 1982, went through a number of stages, each of which was accompanied by discussions of specific problems and consequences within the narrower domain of linguistics as well as the wider range of related fields, such as ontogenetic development, psychology of language use, or biological evolution. Four stages of the Generative Enterprise can be marked off for expository purposes
Causatives and inchoatives in English and their treatment in recent lexicographic practice
143161Studia Anglica Posnaniensi
Linguistics and some aspects of its underlying dynamics
In recent years, central components of a new approach to linguistics, the
Minimalist Program (MP) have come closer to physics. Features of the Minimalist
Program, such as the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of
the Labeling Algorithm that only operates at the interface of Narrow Syntax
with the Conceptual-Intentional and the Sensory-Motor interfaces, the
difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a
sentence and the build-up of the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation
of sentence structures, are directly accessible to representation in terms of
algebraic formalism. Although in our scheme linguistic structures are classical
ones, we find that an interesting and productive isomorphism can be established
between the MP structure, algebraic structures and many-body field theory
opening new avenues of inquiry on the dynamics underlying some central aspects
of linguistics.Comment: 17 page
Improvising Linguistic Style: Social and Affective Bases for Agent Personality
This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of
algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with
applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that
linguistic style is a key aspect of character, and show how speech act
representations common in AI can provide abstract representations from which
computer characters can improvise. We show that the mechanisms proposed
introduce the possibility of socially oriented agents, meet the requirements
that lifelike characters be believable, and satisfy particular criteria for
improvisation proposed by Hayes-Roth.Comment: 10 pages, uses aaai.sty, lingmacros.sty, psfig.st
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