Geoffrey K. Pullum

Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments

Abstract This article examines a type of argument for linguistic nativism that takes the following form: (i) a fact about some natural language is exhibited that allegedly could not be learned from experience without access to a certain kind of (positive) data; (ii) it is claimed that data of the type in question are not found in normal linguistic experience; hence (iii) it is concluded that people cannot be learning the language from mere exposure to language use. We analyze the components of this sort of argument carefully, and examine four exemplars, none of which hold up. We conclude that linguists have some additional work to do if they wish to sustain their claims about having provided support for linguistic nativism, and we offer some reasons for thinking that the relevant kind of future work on this issue is likely to further undermine the linguistic nativist position.

Natural languages and context-free languages

In his 1956 paper ‘Three Models for the Description of Language’ Noam Chomsky posed an interesting open question: when we consider the human languages purely as sets of strings of words (henceforth stringsets), do they always fall within the class called context-free languages (CFL’s)? Chomsky declared that he did not know the answer to this question, and turned to a very different set of questions concerning relative elegance and economy of different types of description. Since 1956 various authors (Chomsky included) have attempted to provide answers in the negative, and the negative answer is now the standardly accepted one. We take up the question again in this paper, and show that it is still open, as all the arguments for the negative answer that have been provided in the literature are either empirically or formally incorrect.

Handbook of Amazonian Languages

The fourth volume in a series on the languages of Amazonia. This volume includes grammatical descriptions of Wai Wai, Warekena, a comparative survey of morphosyntactic features of the Tupi-Guarani languages, and a paper on interclausal reference phenomena in Amahuaca.

Aural Pattern Recognition Experiments and the Subregular Hierarchy

We explore the formal foundations of recent studies comparing aural pattern recognition capabilities of populations of human and non-human animals. To date, these experiments have focused on the boundary between the Regular and Context-Free stringsets. We argue that experiments directed at distinguishing capabilities with respect to the Subregular Hierarchy, which subdivides the class of Regular stringsets, are likely to provide better evidence about the distinctions between the cognitive mechanisms of humans and those of other species. Moreover, the classes of the Subregular Hierarchy have the advantage of fully abstract descriptive (model-theoretic) characterizations in addition to characterizations in more familiar grammar- and automata-theoretic terms. Because the descriptive characterizations make no assumptions about implementation, they provide a sound basis for drawing conclusions about potential cognitive mechanisms from the experimental results. We review the Subregular Hierarchy and provide a concrete set of principles for the design and interpretation of these experiments.

The Duke of York gambit

A Duke who has not been satisfactorily identified with any historical figure is lampooned in a traditional rhyme (believed to have been directed originally at the King of France) as follows: The Grand Old Duke of York He had ten thousand men He marched them up a great high hill And he marched them down again . The implication is that this was incompetent and self-defeating activity on his part. Linguists very frequently seem to give evidence of a tacitly held belief that there is similarly something inept and risible about a linguistic analysis which determines that certain structures are assigned a derivation of the general form A→B→A, that is a derivation in which an underlying representation (or some nonultimate remote representation) is mapped on to an intermediate form distinct from it, and then on to a surface (or other superficial) representation which is identical with the earlier stage.

English nominal gerund phrases as noun phrases with verb-phrase heads

La notion de tete de syntagme en syntaxe. Analyse du syntagme gerondif nominal en anglais dans le cadre de la grammaire syntagmatique generalisee

Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism

Abstract This article is a reply to the foregoing responses to our “Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments” (Pullum and Scholz, this special volume, here-after EASPA). We first address certain philosophical themes that cut across all six responses. We correct the impression held by Lasnik and Uriagereka (L&U) and Crain and Pietroski (C&P) that EASPA owes the reader an alternative theory of language acquisition; we distinguish linguistic nativism from several alternatives, only one of them being anti-nativism as espoused by Sampson; we examine the claim of Thomas that there is an identifiable concept ‘poverty of the stimulus’ in the linguistics literature; we point out that Fodor and Crowther (F&C) appear to misunderstand certain mathematical learnability results; and we address a purported argument for nativism (quite distinct from the stimulus poverty argument we considered in EASPA) that is advanced independently by several respondents: F&C, L&U, and Legate and Yang (L&Y) – an argument based on the underdetermination of theory by evidence.

Computationally relevant properties of natural languages and their grammars

This paper surveys what is currently known about natural language morphology and syntax from the perspective of formal language theory. Firstly, the position of natural language word-sets and sentence-sets on the formal language hierarchy is discussed. Secondly, the contemporary use by linguists of a range of formal grammars (from finite state transducers to indexed grammars) in both word-syntax (i.e. morphology) and sentence-syntax is sketched. Finally, recent developments such as feature-theory, the use of extension and unification, default mechanisms, and metagram-matical techniques, are outlined.

Recursion and the infinitude claim

(2) This property of discrete infinity characterizes EVERY human language; none consists of a finite set of sentences. The unchanged central goal of linguistic theory over the last fifty years has been and remains to give a precise, formal characterization of this property and then to explain how humans develop (or grow) and use discretely infinite linguistic systems. (Epstein and Hornstein 2005: 4)

Model theory and the content of OT constraints

We develop an extensible description logic for stating the content of optimalitytheoretic constraints in phonology, and specify a class of structures for interpreting it. The aim is a transparent formalisation of OT. We show how to state a wide range of constraints, including markedness, input–output faithfulness and base–reduplicant faithfulness. However, output–output correspondence and ‘ intercandidate ’ sympathy are revealed to be problematic : it is unclear that any reasonable class of structures can reconstruct their proponents’ intentions. But our contribution is positive. Proponents of both output–output correspondence and sympathy have offered alternatives that fit into the general OT picture. We show how to state these in a reasonable extension of our formalism. The problematic constraint types were developed to deal with opaque phenomena. We hope to shed new light on the debate about how to handle opacity, by subjecting some common responses to it within OT to critical investigation.