ly, a grammar is a function (a set of rules, constraints, or the like) that produces language by turning information drawn from the mental lexicon into the basic units that the articulatory system turns into a linguistic expression understandable to a hearer. In language comprehension, this process is inverted; the grammar turns information received from the perceptual system into units that re...

Title of dissertation: STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING IN PHONOLOGY Ewan Michael Dunbar, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor William Idsardi Department of Linguistics This dissertation deals with the theory of the phonetic component of grammar in a formal probabilistic inference framework: (1) it has been recognized since the beginning of generative phonology that ...

Modeling sequence evolution on phylogenetic trees is a useful technique in computational biology. Especially powerful are models which take account of the heterogeneous nature of sequence evolution according to the "grammar" of the encoded gene features. However, beyond a modest level of model complexity, manual coding of models becomes prohibitively labor-intensive. We demonstrate, via a set o...

We argue that the grammatical diversity observed among the world's languages emerges from the struggle between individual cognitive systems trying to impose their preferred structure on human language. We investigate the cognitive bases of the two most common word orders in the world's languages: SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO. Evidence from language change, grammaticalization, stability of ...

Unification-based grammar formalisms use structures containing sets of features to describe linguistic objects. Although computational algorithms for unification of feature structures have been worked out in experimental research, these algcwithms become quite complicated, and a more precise description of feature structures is desirable. We have developed a model in which descriptions of featu...

Development of large-scale grammars for natural languages is a complicated endeavor: Grammars are developed collaboratively by teams of linguists, computational linguists, and computer scientists, in a process very similar to the development of large-scale software. Grammars are written in grammatical formalisms that resemble very-high-level programming languages, and are thus very similar to c...

This thesis describes a computational model of child language acquisition which acquires a recursive phrase-structure grammar in the absence of X-Bar Theory. The model assumes no grammar, lexicon, or segmentation. Input utterances include phrases as well as sentences, of no more than two levels of embedding, paired with their semantic representations. The initial products of acquisition are a l...

Berkeley FrameNet is a lexico-semantic resource for English based on the theory of frame semantics. It has been exploited in a range of natural language processing applications and has inspired the development of framenets for many languages. We present a methodological approach to the extraction and generation of a computational multilingual FrameNet-based grammar and lexicon. The approach lev...

In Johnson and Lappin (1997) (J&L) we presented arguments against the incorporation of global economy conditions on derivations into the theory of grammar. The economy of derivation model of grammar proposed in Chapter 4 of Chomsky (1995b) postulates three such conditions: Procrastinate, The Shortest Derivation Principle (SDP), and the Have an Effect on Output Condition (HEOC). We showed that t...