Open AccessWhat is grammar like? A usage-based constructionist perspective
Author(s) -
Vsevolod Kapatsinski
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
linguistic issues in language technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1945-3590
pISSN - 1945-3604
DOI - 10.33011/lilt.v11i.1361
Subject(s) - rule based machine translation , computer science , perspective (graphical) , grammar , natural language processing , abstraction , artificial intelligence , computational linguistics , matching (statistics) , inference , grammar induction , generative grammar , mildly context sensitive grammar formalism , linguistics , emergent grammar , mathematics , philosophy , statistics , epistemology
This paper is intended to elucidate some implications of usage-based linguistic theory for statistical and computational models of language acquisition, focusing on morphology and morphophonology. I discuss the need for grammar (a.k.a. abstraction), the contents of individual grammars (a potentially infinite number of constructions, paradigmatic mappings and predictive relationships between phonological units), the computational characteristics of constructions (complex non-crossover interactions among partially redundant features), resolution of competition among constructions (probability matching), and the need for multimodel inference in modeling internal grammars underlying the linguistic performance of a community.