Language as Labor: Semantic Activities as the Basis for Language Development

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108263/1/ets201026.pd

A path from broader to narrower grammars: the acquisition of argument structure in English and Hungarian

In recent years a growing number of theoretical and empirical studies of first language acquisition have cast doubt on the hypothesis that acquiring language is a deterministic process in which the role of experience is restricted to triggering innate principles of grammatical content. The aim of this thesis is to explore areas of language where input -based learning demonstrably plays a role and to find learning mechanisms that account for the construction of observed overgeneral grammars and the process of their restriction.The thesis is a comparative study of the acquisition of argument structure in English and in Hungarian. The detailed analysis of spontaneous speech samples of two -- year -old children reveals that the omission of subjects, objects and prepositions at the so- called telegraphic stage of English child language cannot be explained either by limitations in processing capacity or by postulating an incomplete Universal Grammar. It is suggested that children's implicit arguments and oblique noun phrases lacking case or prepositional marking need not be analysed as syntactically ill- formed, since they conform to permissible abstract structural configurations. The errors may instead be attributed to overgeneral or indeterminate rules of pragmatics, which are fuzzy and variable in the mature grammar.It is shown that the nature of the children's intake of the primary linguistic data is a good predictor of the nature and extent of overgeneralisation or indeterminacy and of the speed with which the rules are fine -tuned to match the target

Challenging common sense about nonsense : an integrational approach to schizophrenic language behaviour

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-168).Due to certain fundamental flaws, orthodox linguistics has not succeeded in producing a coherent account of 'schizophrenic language' - the host of symptoms that are alternatively characterised as evidence of formal thought disorder or labelled as disorganised speech, a disorder in itself. The most important of these flaws are its treatment of languages as fixed codes, which doubles as an explanation of how linguistic communication works, and its postulation of the mental structures that would be necessary if languages were indeed fixed codes, and communication a matter of encoding and decoding messages. In particular, orthodox linguistics has bolstered the now-dominant neo-Kraepelinian, biomedical account of schizophrenia, which treats utterances as symptoms that give clues to brain (dis)organisation and (dys) function. Integrational linguistics, which criticises the culturally based assumptions - collectively referred to as 'the language myth' - that are at the heart of the orthodox account of languages and language, provides an alternative. It sympathises with the growing trend in cognitive science and philosophy towards 'embodiment' and 'distributed cognition', which recognises that encultured entities like languages, minds, brains, bodies, and world are intrinsically defined by their co-evolution in the species, and co-emergence during an individual's development. Integrationists argue that by focusing in the first instance on second-order cultural constructs called 'languages', orthodox linguistics fails to give an account of the first-order experience of language users. This thesis approaches the topic of 'schizophrenic language' from a broadly integrationist perspective in order to demonstrate that because orthodox linguistics is so widely taken for granted in psychiatry, its biases inform current mainstream accounts of schizophrenic language, motivate the outright dismissal of interpersonal accounts, past and present, and provide a skewed picture of the phenomenon it purports to be describing, by ultimately constructing an individual-focused, deficit-based account of what is not, as opposed to what is. That is, by holding up orthodox linguistics' idealised version of communication and speakers (which has little applicability even to 'normal' language users), it uses deviation from the ideal as description and explanation, rather than recognising the strategies actually employed by schizophrenics in their attempts to make sense, even if these attempts fail. The alternative argued for here is to apply the tenets of integrationist linguistics to schizophrenic language behaviour, to give a fuller account of communication situations involving schizophrenics and normal interlocutors. As a result, this thesis calls for a reformulation of the idea that incomprehensibility stems from deviant speech, itself the product of an irrational brain. 'Sense', 'deviance' and 'irrationality' are a moment-to-moment metalinguistic appraisals made by language users, second-order cultural constructions that shape the speech community's response to certain individuals. Describing the speech of schizophrenics as 'deviant', 'irrational', or 'nonsensical' constrains their jointly-constructed capability of making sense using the resources (which may include other individual's minds) at their disposal. Integration linguistics thus brings into focus a moral and political dimension to such descriptions which is obscured by an orthodox linguistics-biased biomedical approach

Natural Language Processing

The subject of Natural Language Processing can be considered in both broad and narrow senses. In the broad sense, it covers processing issues at all levels of natural language understanding, including speech recognition, syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences, reference to the discourse context (including anaphora, inference of referents, and more extended relations of discourse coherence and narrative structure), conversational inference and implicature, and discourse planning and generation. In the narrower sense, it covers the syntactic and semantic processing sentences to deliver semantic objects suitable for referring, inferring, and the like. Of course, the results of inference and reference may under some circumstances play a part in processing in the narrow sense. But the processes that are characteristic of these other modules are not the primary concern