The beginning of this century hailed a new paradigm in linguistics, the paradigm brought about by de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Generale and subsequently elaborated by Jakobson, Hjelmslev and other linguists. It seemed that the linguistics of this century was destined to be structuralistic. However, half of the century later a brand new paradigm was introduced by Chomsky's Syntactic Structures followed by Montague's formalization of semantics. This new turn has brought linguistics surprisingly close to mathematics and logic, (...) and has facilitated a direct practical exploitation of linguistic theory by computer science. (shrink)

This article argues that linguistically endangered minority groups often face endangerment due to structural linguistic injustice that arises from past injustices and ongoing unjust social processes. Language revitalization is often a justified way of reforming unjust social structures. I connect this discussion to another debate, namely, whether historical injustice (and the requirement for its correction) may be superseded. I ask: which changing circumstances might lead to the supersession of structural linguistic injustice? Of the many reasons to reform unjust (...) social structures, I focus on dignity-based concerns. Historically-sensitive dignity-based concerns are relevant for judging whether supersession of structural linguistic injustice has occurred. My view is largely present-oriented, but history still plays a role in deciding the strength of justificatory bases for structural reformation. (shrink)

This paper develops a concept of structural linguistic injustice. By employing the so-called structural-injustice approach, it argues that individuals' seemingly harmless language attitudes and language choices might enable serious harms on a collective level, constituting what one could call a structural linguistic injustice. Section 1 introduces the linguistic-justice debate. By doing so, it establishes linguistic diversity as the context in which phenomena such as individuals' language attitudes, language choice, and language loss occur. Moreover, the paper illustrates why (...) employing the structural-injustice approach might be beneficial for the linguistic-justice debate. Section 2 conceptualizes individuals' (certain types of) language attitudes and language choice as (objectionable) social structures. Section 3 provides a concept of structural linguistic injustice. Section 4 suggests one possible remedy for structural linguistic injustice. Section 5 concludes the paper. (shrink)

The beginning of this century hailed a new paradigm in linguistics, the paradigm brought about by de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Genérále and subsequently elaborated by Jakobson, Hjelmslev and other linguists. It seemed that the linguistics of this century was destined to be structuralistic. However, half of the century later a brand new paradigm was introduced by Chomsky's Syntactic Structures followed by Montague's formalization of semantics. This new turn has brought linguistics surprisingly close to mathematics and logic, (...) and has facilitated a direct practical exploitation of linguistic theory by computer science. (shrink)

This book identifies the Romantic notion of the whole as the fundamental epistemological source of the notion of structure in the thinking of the Prague Linguistic Circle, primarily its Russian representatives, and studies what amounted to the slow.

The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the cognitive paradigm have traditionally been discussed against the background of generative grammar, its immediate predecessor. A significantly less researched yet no less interesting relationship is the one between the cognitive and structuralist paradigm. This article focuses on the in part converging, in part diverging semiotic assumptions underlying European structural linguistics and Cognitive Grammar. A comparison of important concepts of both theories shows that, although Cognitive Grammar arrives at a more realistic understanding (...) of how language works in discourse, the theory fails to offer a coherent theory of the linguistic sign. (shrink)

Comparative study of two languages of different structures has both theoretical and practical significance, enables somebody to identify similar and distinctive features, find universals and unique, helps to penetrate deeper into the inner workings of each of the compared languages and understand their national identity. The subject of our comparative study are languages of different structures - Russian and Bashkir languages - the first refers to a group of inflected, the second - to the group of agglutinative languages. Comparative research (...) of languages of different structures can be carried out in two aspects: theoretical and linguistic. In the first case, the analysis of language material is subjected without restriction at all levels of the language system. Data from these studies can be used in the creation of comparative descriptive grammars in lexicographical work and in the translation business. In the second case only microlanguage is matched, which is represented in the lexical and grammatical minimum of studied second language. Materials of such a compressed comparative analysis used in the practice of language teaching, mainly in teaching a second, non-native language. When a comparative study of languages in linguistic aspect is important direction of comparisons - what language is elected as the original one. Since the formation of national-Russian bilingualism is the subject of study of Russian language, as the source, it is desirable to choose Russian language. In this case, the reference point is the absorption of funds Russian as a second language. Materials of comparative study of two languages gives a clear idea of what linguistic phenomena and their symptoms are identical in them, what is only partially overlap, what is completely different. This knowledge will help to consciously manage the impact of native language on the studied non-native Russian language. In the comparative study of Russian and Bashkir languages done very little, but it is a lot of work has already begun. (shrink)

A popular interpretation of linguistic theories has it that they should describe the brain at a high level of abstraction. One way this has been understood is as the requirement that the theory’s derivational structure reflect (by being isomorphic to) relevant structural properties of the language user’s brain. An important criticisrn of this idea, made originally by Crispin Wright against Gareth Evans in the 1980s, still has purchase, notwithstanding attempts to reply to it, notably by Martin Davies and, indirectly, (...) Christopher Peacocke. Wright’s objection seems to have been forgotten rather than seen off. (shrink)

What is a language? What do scientific grammars tell us about the structure of individual languages and human language in general? What kind of science is linguistics? These and other questions are the subject of Ryan M. Nefdt's Language, Science, and Structure. -/- Linguistics presents a unique and challenging subject matter for the philosophy of science. As a special science, its formalisation and naturalisation inspired what many consider to be a scientific revolution in the study of mind and (...) language. Yet radical internal theory change, multiple competing frameworks, and issues of modelling and realism have largely gone unaddressed in the field. Nefdt develops a structural realist perspective on the philosophy of linguistics which aims to confront the aforementioned topics in new ways while expanding the outlook toward new scientific connections and novel philosophical insights. On this view, languages are real patterns which emerge from complex biological systems. Nefdt's exploration of this novel view will be especially valuable to those working in formal and computational linguistics, cognitive science, and the philosophies of science, mathematics, and language. (shrink)

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select (...) a set of variables and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Linguistic structures have recently started to attract attention from economists as determinants of economic phenomena. This paper provides the first comprehensive review of this nascent literature and its achievements so far. First, we explore the complex connections between language, culture, thought and behaviour. Then, we summarize the empirical evidence on the relationship between linguistic structures and economic and social outcomes. We follow up with a discussion of data, empirical design and identification. The paper concludes by discussing implications for future research (...) and policy. (shrink)

Linguistics as a science has rapidly changed during the course of a relatively short period. The mathematical foundations of the science, however, present a different story below the surface. In this paper, I argue that due to the former, the seismic shifts in theory over the past 80 years opens linguistics up to the problem of pessimistic meta-induction or radical theory change. I further argue that, due to the latter, one current solution to this problem in the philosophy (...) of science, namely structural realism :403–424, 1998; French in Proc Aristot Soc 106:167–185, 2006), should be viewed as especially enticing for linguists, as their field is a largely structural enterprise. I discuss particular historical instances of theory change in generative syntax before investigating two views on the nature of structural properties and eventually proposing an approach in terms of invariance :162–186, 2015) as a grounding for structural realism in the history and philosophy of linguistics. (shrink)

Structural priming is a useful tool for investigating linguistics representations. We argue that structural priming can be extended to the investigation of pragmatic representations such as Gricean enrichments. That is not to say priming is without its limitations, however. Interpreting a failure to observe priming may not be as simple as Branigan & Pickering imply.

We provide additional support for Cowan's claim that short term memory (STM) involves a range of 3–5 tokens, on the basis of language correlational analyses. If language is at least partly learned, linguistic dependency structure should reflect properties of the cognitive components mediating learning; one such component is STM. In this view, the range over which statistical regularity extends in ordinary text would be suggestive of STM span. Our analyses of eight languages are consistent with STM span being about four (...) chunks. (shrink)

Recent discussions of ontology have shown an interest in the relation between logic, language and ontology. Quine, for example, has shown how sentences translated into canonical form determine ontological commitment in terms of the values over which bound variables range, while Strawson has maintained that conditions inherent to language determine a system of ontological concepts. But in these discussions the role linguistics might have in the construction of ontological schemes is seldom seriously considered. Except for Benjamin Lee Whorf’s examination (...) through the use of descriptive linguistic techniques of the relation between ontological schemes and the structure of languages, little has been done to apply the results of linguistic research to questions of ontology. In the past this could be attributed to the absence in structural linguistics of significant generalizations about language above the morphophonemic level. This situation has altered with the development of transformational linguistic theory. That theory contains an extensive set of generalizations about the form and content of any natural language. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al. adopt a methodology for psychology connecting behavioral capacities to the format of the mental systems underlying them. This methodology opens up avenues connecting linguistic theory to comparative psychology. On the assumption that language structures thought, identifying the formal structure of human language can generate hypotheses connecting distinctively human cognitive traits to the distinctive structures of human language.

The author considers a problem of understanding. He claims that we understand texts, cultural objects rather than a man. He considers understanding as a process of interpretation of linguistic expressions and cultural objects. The author observes two sides of the meaning of linguistic expressions: a general (or social) one, which is common in a certain language community, and a personal one, which defines personal understanding. It is argued that mutual understanding is possible only on the stage of general meaning. However, (...) the exchange of personal meanings is a very sophisticated process. (shrink)

The philosophy of linguistics is a rich philosophical domain which encompasses various disciplines. One of the aims of this thesis is to unite theoretical linguistics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science and the ontology of language. Each part of the research presented here targets separate but related goals with the unified aim of bringing greater clarity to the foundations of linguistics from a philosophical perspective. Part I is devoted to the methodology of linguistics in (...) terms of scientific modelling. I argue against both the Conceptualist and Platonist interpretations of linguistic theory by means of three grades of mathematical involvement for linguistic grammars. Part II explores the specific models of syntactic and semantics by an analogy with the harder sciences. In Part III, I develop a novel account of linguistic ontology and in the process comment on the type-token distinction, the role and connection with mathematics and the nature of linguistic objects. In this research, I offer a structural realist interpretation of linguistic methodology with a nuanced structuralist picture for its ontology. This proposal is informed by historical and current work in theoretical linguistics as well as philosophical views on ontology, scientific modelling and mathematics. (shrink)

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics.1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and more recently, to the political philosopher John (...) Rawls (1971). The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky’s thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge more generally (Chomsky, 1986, 1988, 2000; Saporta, 1978). If the nature of moral knowledge is comparable in some way to the nature of linguistic knowledge, as defended recently by Harman (1977), Dwyer (1999, 2004), and Mikhail (2000; in press), then what should we expect to find when we look at the anatomy of our moral faculty? Is there a grammar, and if so, how can the moral grammarian uncover its structure? Are we aware of our moral grammar, its method of operation, and its moment-to-moment functioning in our judgments? Is there a universal moral grammar that allows each child to build a particular moral grammar? Once acquired, are different moral grammars mutually incomprehensible in the same way that a native Chinese speaker finds a native Italian speaker incomprehensible? How does the child acquire a particular moral grammar, especially if her experiences are impoverished relative to the moral judgments she makes? Are there certain forms of brain damage that disrupt moral competence but leave other forms of reasoning intact? And how did this machinery evolve, and for what particular adaptive function? We will have more to say about many of these questions later on, and Hauser (2006) develops others. However, in order to flesh out the key ideas and particular empirical research paths, let us turn to some of the central questions in the study of our language faculty.. (shrink)

In Jeffrey King’s theory of structured propositions, propositional structure mirrors the syntactic structure of natural language sentences that express it. I provide cases where this claim individuates propositions too finely across languages. Crucially, King’s paradigmatic proposition-fact ^that Dara swims^ cannot be believed by a monolingual Greek speaker, due to Greek syntax requiring an obligatory article in front of proper names. King’s two possible replies are: (i) to try to streamline the syntax of Greek and English; or (ii) to insist that (...) English speakers can believe propositions inexpressible in Greek. I argue that the former option entails giving up a neo-Russelian framework, and the latter makes King’s account arbitrary or trivial. I conclude that the mirroring claim is untenable. (shrink)

This volume is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States, the period from the 1930s to the 1980s. It offers detailed discussions of the key issues and developments in the transition from (post-Bloomfieldian) structural linguistics to early generative grammar.

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this question using a recent longitudinal dataset collected from a single child, consisting of egocentric visual data paired with text transcripts. We train both language-only and vision-and-language neural networks and analyze the (...) linguistic knowledge they acquire. In parallel with findings from Jeffrey Elman's seminal work, the neural networks form emergent clusters of words corresponding to syntactic (nouns, transitive and intransitive verbs) and semantic categories (e.g., animals and clothing), based solely on one child's linguistic input. The networks also acquire sensitivity to acceptability contrasts from linguistic phenomena, such as determiner-noun agreement and argument structure. We find that incorporating visual information produces an incremental gain in predicting words in context, especially for syntactic categories that are comparatively more easily grounded, such as nouns and verbs, but the underlying linguistic representations are not fundamentally altered. Our findings demonstrate which kinds of linguistic knowledge are learnable from a snapshot of a single child's real developmental experience. (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model that integrates a dynamically structured holographic memory system into the ACT-R cognitive architecture to explain how linguistic representations are encoded and accessed in memory. ACT-R currently serves as the most precise expression of the moment-by-moment working memory retrievals that support sentence comprehension. The ACT-R model of sentence comprehension is able to capture a range of linguistic phenomena, but there are cases where the model makes the wrong predictions, such as the over-prediction of retrieval interference (...) effects during sentence comprehension. Here, we investigate one such case involving the processing of sentences with negative polarity items and consider how a dynamically structured holographic memory system might provide a cognitively plausible and principled explanation of some previously unexplained effects. Specifically, we show that by replacing ACT-R's declarative memory with a dynamically structured memory, we can explain a wider range of behavioral data involving reading times and judgments of grammaticality. We show that our integrated model provides a better fit to human error rates and response latencies than the original ACT-R model. These results provide proof-of-concept for the unification of two independent computational cognitive frameworks. (shrink)

The nature of linguistic understanding is a much-debated topic. Among the issues that have been discussed, two questions have recently received a lot of attention: (Q1) ‘Are states of understanding direct (i.e. represent solely what is said) or indirect (i.e. represent what is said as being said/asserted)?’ and (Q2) ‘What kind of mental attitude is linguistic understanding (e.g. knowledge, belief, seeming)?’ This paper argues that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, there is no straightforward answer to either of these questions. (...) This is because linguistic understanding cannot be identified with a single mental attitude towards a particular representation. Instead, we should characterize states of linguistic understanding as involving complex representational structures generated by a dual-stream process. The first stream operates on direct representations of what is said, while the second operates on representations of what is said as being said/asserted by a given source. Both these streams feed a situation model, i.e. a complex representation of a state of affairs described by a given piece of discourse. (shrink)

Peirce’s sign model is introduced as incompatible with structural semiology in the majority of semiotics textbooks. In this paper, I would like to argue against this general polarization of the semiotic discipline. I focus on compatibilities between Lucien Tesnière’s syntactic theory (verbal valency) and Peirce’s logic of relatives. My main argument is that structural linguistics is not necessarily dyadic, and that Peirce’s sign doctrine is perfectly structural. To define the structural approach in Peirce, I analyze (...) the notions of form (structure) and substance in Hjelmslev and Peirce. The aim of my argument is to contribute to attempts to introduce Peirce’s theory to the field of linguistics in the hope that such an integration will be beneficiary for general linguistics. To extend and support my argument, I provide some examples from biology where Peirce’s theory has been applied. I demonstrate an analogy between the biological structures of proteins and the structure of a sentence with Peirce’s own writings. I consequently introduce Peirce as the first structural semiologist and as the first biolinguist. (shrink)

Alien Languages and Linguistic Structure.

Curiously, though he provides in Making It Explicit (MIE) elaborate accounts of various representational idioms, of anaphora and deixis, and of quantification, Robert Brandom nowhere attempts to lay out how his understanding of content and his view of the role of logical idioms combine in even the simplest cases of what he calls paradigmatic logical vocabulary. That is, Brandom has a philosophical account of content as updating potential - as inferential potential understood in the sense of commitment or entitlement preservation (...) - and says that the point of logical vocabulary is to make available the expressive resources to make explicit such semantic structures as arise from discursive scorekeeping practice. Thus, one would expect an account of the updating or inferential potential of sentences involving logical vocabulary, an account which is such as to assign to those sentences the inferential significance necessary for this expressive job. In short, one would expect a semantics of logical vocabulary - &, ν, ∼ → - in terms of the difference an assertion of a sentence involving it makes to the atomic score of a linguistic agent, and a completeness proof for the logic generated by this semantics. Despite this, no such semantics is given in MIE. It is in the current paper. (shrink)

The papers in this volume are contributions to a comparative semantics, understood in the context of the theory of Logical Form as a branch of comparative syntax. In contrastively exploring a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Navajo, Spanish and Toba Batak, the authors provide new insights into our understanding of the nature of quantificational, WH and anaphoric phenomena, and into the form of constraints, including subjacency and ECP, on the structure of binding at Logical (...) Form. -- Back cover. (shrink)