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Productivity and Reuse in Language: A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage

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"Language allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This fundamental and much-celebrated property is made possible by a division of labor between a large inventory of stored items (e.g., affixes, words, idioms) and a computational system that productively combines these stored units on the fly to create a potentially unlimited array of new expressions. A language learner must discover a language's productive, reusable units and determine which computational processes can give rise to new expressions. But how does the learner differentiate between the reusable, generalizable units (for example, the affix -ness, as in coolness, orderliness, cheapness) and apparent units that do not actually generalize in practice (for example, -th, as in warmth but not coolth)? In this book, Timothy O'Donnell proposes a formal computational model, Fragment Grammars, to answer these questions. This model treats productivity and reuse as the target of inference in a probabilistic framework, asking how an optimal agent can make use of the distribution of forms in the linguistic input to learn the distribution of productive word-formation processes and reusable units in a given language"--MIT CogNet.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Publisher

: The MIT Press., 2015

Collation

1 online resource (xii, 337 pages) :illustrations

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262326803

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NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

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online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Psycholinguistics
Cognition.
Psycholinguistics.
Language acquisition.
Cognitive grammar.
Memory.
Language and languages.

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Statement of Responsibility

Timothy J. O'Donnell.

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agus

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