Linguists of many persuasions take a realist view of linguistic theory as it relates to learning: language learners, in infancy and childhood, are assumed to come equipped with whatever principles of linguistic structure and of language learning are biologically determined in our species. They encounter and process numerous input data, provided essentially at random, from the ambient language. ...

There are two orders of facts about polysemy: a satisfactory theory must account in a natural way for both. The first concerns differences in the semantic content of the interpretations of a word in different contexts. It is this aspect of polysemy which has been the most actively researched, with the aim of discovering regularity and predictability. Noteworthy recent proposals concerning polys...

One of the primary goals of linguistics is to find a suitable model of natural (human) language. Among the models proposed, one of them, the transformational grammar (abbreviated T-grammar) seems very promising and, in the past decade, has received considerable attention from linguists. At present, there are numerous alternative forms of the model under serious consideration. In fact, there is ...

For many linguistic investigations, the first step is to find examples. In the 21st century, they should all be found, not invented. Thus linguists need flexible tools for finding even quite rare phenomena. To support linguists well, they need to be fast even where corpora are very large and queries are complex. We present extensions to the CQL ’Corpus Query Language’ for intuitive creation of ...

We present in this paper a review on the linguistic literature on the types of uses of definite descriptions (noun phrases with the definite article the). Definite descriptions have been studied extensively by linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computational linguists. The theories discussed in this paper help us to understand the problem of interpreting definite descriptions. We look ...

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The study presented in this paper evaluates current progress in a long term effort to provide behavior oriented authoring tools to user interface developers to facilitate rapid development of advanced language understanding interfaces. The results of our study show promise that authors with very little training in computational linguistics can perform nearly as well as graduate students in a la...

The many electronic text corpora available nowadays present ever fewer obstacles to a wide range of corpus linguistic study. However, corpora are expensive resources to create and to update, and there remain problems for linguists if they seek access to very large, very recent, or changing language. The World Wide Web, whilst intended as an information source, is an obvious resource for the ret...

This paper is meant to be an introduction to connectionism for linguists. It covers fundamentals of connectionism and applications of connectionism to human language processing. Because the first (and the last for some) question that linguists want to ask is “why bother with connectionism?” it would be appropriate to try to answer this question first. A quick and rather naive answer is that bot...