In this squib, I present an alternative view of the Gen and Eval mechanisms that lie at the heart of Optimality Theory (“OT”) (see Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993). As originally conceived, Gen is a pattern generator which creates an infinite set of possible phonological realizations of a lexical input string (“candidates”). Eval then evaluates the entire (infinite) set to d...

The most common speech understanding architecture for spoken dialogue systems is a combination of speech recognition based on a class N-gram language model, and robust parsing. For many types of applications, however, grammar-based recognition can offer concrete advantages. Training a good class N-gram language model requires substantial quantities of corpus data, which is generally not availab...

In general a grammar describes a (possibly infinite) set of sentences with a finite structural description. Computational Grammar Induction (CGI) deals with the creation of computational models for identification of these infinite sets on the basis of a finite set of examples. CGI is a field in its own right, with its own internal research questions, many of which have no direct impact on the s...

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It has been observed that overt and null subjects do not have the same distributional properties within the same pro-drop language. That is, there are certain grammatical and discourse principles that determine the occurrence of overt versus null pronominal subjects in a particular context (Enç, 1986; Erguvanlı-Taylan, 1986; Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1997, 1999). For example, it is known that overt...

The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual systems) and reality (i.e. the physical world). In the present paper, I explore the view that the mass/count distinction is a matter of vagueness. While every noun/concept may in...

Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge...