Scott Grimm

A statistical model of the grammatical choices in child production of dative sentences

Focusing on childrens production of the dative alternation in English, we examine whether childrens choices are influenced by the same factors that influence adults’ choices, and whether, like adults, they are sensitive to multiple factors simultaneously. We do so by using mixed-effect regression models to analyse child and child-directed datives extracted from the Child Language Data Exchange System corpus. Such models allow us to investigate the collective and independent effects of multiple factors simultaneously. The results show that childrens choices are influenced by multiple factors (length of theme and recipient, nominal expression type of both, syntactic persistence) and pattern similarly to child-directed speech. Our findings demonstrate parallels between child and adult speech, consistent with recent acquisition research suggesting that there is a usage-based continuity between child and adult grammars. Furthermore, they highlight the utility of analysing childrens speech from a multi-variable perspective, and portray a learner who is sensitive to the multiple cues present in her input.

Not a Simple Yes or No: Uncertainty in Indirect Answers

There is a long history of using logic to model the interpretation of indirect speech acts. Classical logical inference, however, is unable to deal with the combinations of disparate, conflicting, uncertain evidence that shape such speech acts in discourse. We propose to address this by combining logical inference with probabilistic methods. We focus on responses to polar questions with the following property: they are neither yes nor no, but they convey information that can be used to infer such an answer with some degree of confidence, though often not with enough confidence to count as resolving. We present a novel corpus study and associated typology that aims to situate these responses in the broader class of indirect question--answer pairs (IQAPs). We then model the different types of IQAPs using Markov logic networks, which combine first-order logic with probabilities, emphasizing the ways in which this approach allows us to model inferential uncertainty about both the context of utterance and intended meanings.

Case Attraction in Ancient Greek

Case attraction has stood as a puzzling, and elusive, oddity of older Indo-European languages. This paper focuses on attraction in Ancient Greek, establishing both the regularity of the operation and its underlying motivation. A novel method is proposed for grounding case in terms of a feature-based representation of agentivity properties, loosely based on Dowtys proto-role theory, but reformulated in terms of privative opposition and hierarchically organized via a lattice. This structure is then used to model the case system of Ancient Greek and derive a hierarchical ordering on the case system in terms of agentivity. Modelling the interaction between this hierarchy and the other factors involved in case attraction in the Optimality Theory framework yields a full solution, predicting both its distribution and frequencies therein.

Commentary on Kemmerer: the challenges and rewards of trying to combine linguistics and cognitive neuroscience

Kemmerer’s target article points to the necessity of conducting cognitive neuroscience research cross-linguistically, particularly considering languages with nominal classification systems (Kemmerer, 2016). The particulars of focusing on this type of research points to a larger idea that needs emphasis: linguistics and cognitive neuroscience need to work together more in interdisciplinary teams to understand language, and its connection to the brain, fully. This type of collaboration, supported by Kemmerer (2016), has the potential to provide fruitful avenues for language research. We are currently working in one such collaboration, and there are several difficulties that can arise, likely leading to the current fragmentation of these two areas of language science. In the following sections, we will discuss some of these challenges in collaborating, ways to connect these two fields, and some tractable problems in which this methodology allows for exploration.