A human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems. One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than attempting to model w…
"We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language--'the language faculty'--raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This boo…
An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition -- often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms -- is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in d…
The intersecting worlds of Zellig Harris, Noam Chomsky's intellectual and political mentor. In 1995, Robert Barsky met with Noam Chomsky to discuss hiswork-in-progress, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (MIT Press, 1997). Chomsky told Barsky that he shouldfocus his attention instead on midcentury linguist and activist Zellig Harris, who was, Chomsky modestly insisted, more interesting than Cho…
This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring express…
First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjecti…
Linguists reconsider issues raised in Chomsky's 1977 article "On Wh-movement" from the perspective of current Minimalist theory.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
In What Counts, Elena Herburger considers the effects of focus on interpretation. She investigates how focus affects the pragmatics and truth conditions of a sentence by rearranging its quantificational structure.Adopting a neo-Davidsonian stance, Herburger claims that various pragmatic and truth-conditional effects of focus sustain a uniform explanation if focus is viewed as imposing structure…
What the Hands Reveal About the Brain provides dramatic evidence that language is not limited to hearing and speech, that there are primary linguistic systems passed down from one generation of deaf people to the next, which have been forged into antonomous languages and are not derived front spoken languages.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.