Grammatical Approaches To Language Processing

This book contains papers that were written to honor Professor Lyn Frazier on the occasion of her retirement from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Some were presented at the Lynschrift on May 19-20, 2018; others were written especially for this volume. The papers report original research on, or research-based theoretical analyses of, several of the domains that Professor Frazier contributed to during her career. The volume begins with a brief overview of Professor Frazier’s research contributions and an appreciation of the contributions she has made to the field of psycholinguistics and to her students and colleagues. The next several chapters discuss the roles that prosody plays in language processing, and the volume continues with chapters on the topic that established Professor Frazier as a major psycholinguistic theorist, syntactic processing. The volume then explores the roles semantics and pragmatics play in language comprehension, and concludes with reports of applications and extensions of research on language processing. All chapters were contributed by current and former students and colleagues of Professor Frazier in gratitude for the impact she has had on their lives and careers.

This volume brings together linguistic, psychological and neurological research in a discussion of the Cognitive Dualism Hypothesis, whose central idea is that human cognitive activity in general and linguistic cognition in particular cannot reasonably be reduced to a single, monolithic system of mental processing, but that they have a dualistic organization. Drawing on a wide range of methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks that account for how language users mentally represent, process and produce linguistic discourse, the studies in this volume provide a critical examination of dualistic approaches to language and cognition and their impact on a number of fields. The topics range from formulaic language, the study of reasoning and linguistic discourse, and the lexicon–grammar distinction to studies of specific linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles, comment adverbs, extra-clausal elements in spoken discourse and the processing of syntactic groups.

Studies of language acqUiSItion have largely ignored processing prin ciples and mechanisms. Not surprisingly, questions concerning the analysis of an informative linguistic input - the potential evidence for grammatical parameter setting - have also been ignored. Especially in linguistic approaches to language acquisition, the role of language processing has not been prominent. With few exceptions (e. g. Goodluck and Tavakolian, 1982; Pinker, 1984) discussions of language perform ance tend to arise only when experimental debris, the artifact of some experiment, needs to be cleared away. Consequently, language pro cessing has been viewed as a collection of rather uninteresting perform ance factors obscuring the true object of interest, namely, grammar acquisition. On those occasions when parsing "strategies" have been incorporated into accounts of language development, they have often been discussed as vague preferences, not open to rigorous analysis. In principle, however, theories of language comprehension can and should be subjected to the same criteria of explicitness and explanatoriness as other theories, e. g. , theories of grammar. Thus their peripheral role in accounts of language development may reflect accidental factors, rather than any inherent fuzziness or irrelevance to the language acquisition problem. It seems probable that an explicit model of the way(s) processing routines are applied in acquisition would help solve some central problems of grammar acquisition, since these routines regulate the application of grammatical knowledge to novel inputs.

Studies of language acqUiSItion have largely ignored processing prin ciples and mechanisms. Not surprisingly, questions concerning the analysis of an informative linguistic input - the potential evidence for grammatical parameter setting - have also been ignored. Especially in linguistic approaches to language acquisition, the role of language processing has not been prominent. With few exceptions (e. g. Goodluck and Tavakolian, 1982; Pinker, 1984) discussions of language perform ance tend to arise only when experimental debris, the artifact of some experiment, needs to be cleared away. Consequently, language pro cessing has been viewed as a collection of rather uninteresting perform ance factors obscuring the true object of interest, namely, grammar acquisition. On those occasions when parsing "strategies" have been incorporated into accounts of language development, they have often been discussed as vague preferences, not open to rigorous analysis. In principle, however, theories of language comprehension can and should be subjected to the same criteria of explicitness and explanatoriness as other theories, e. g. , theories of grammar. Thus their peripheral role in accounts of language development may reflect accidental factors, rather than any inherent fuzziness or irrelevance to the language acquisition problem. It seems probable that an explicit model of the way(s) processing routines are applied in acquisition would help solve some central problems of grammar acquisition, since these routines regulate the application of grammatical knowledge to novel inputs.

The impact of computer systems that can understand natural language will be tremendous. To develop this capability we need to be able to automatically and efficiently analyze large amounts of text. Manually devised rules are not sufficient to provide coverage to handle the complex structure of natural language, necessitating systems that can automatically learn from examples. To handle the flexibility of natural language, it has become standard practice to use statistical models, which assign probabilities for example to the different meanings of a word or the plausibility of grammatical constructions. This book develops a general coarse-to-fine framework for learning and inference in large statistical models for natural language processing. Coarse-to-fine approaches exploit a sequence of models which introduce complexity gradually. At the top of the sequence is a trivial model in which learning and inference are both cheap. Each subsequent model refines the previous one, until a final, full-complexity model is reached. Applications of this framework to syntactic parsing, speech recognition and machine translation are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in terms of accuracy and speed. The book is intended for students and researchers interested in statistical approaches to Natural Language Processing. Slav’s work Coarse-to-Fine Natural Language Processing represents a major advance in the area of syntactic parsing, and a great advertisement for the superiority of the machine-learning approach. Eugene Charniak (Brown University)

Reversible grammar allows computational models to be built that are equally well suited for the analysis and generation of natural language utterances. This task can be viewed from very different perspectives by theoretical and computational linguists, and computer scientists. The papers in this volume present a broad range of approaches to reversible, bi-directional, and non-directional grammar systems that have emerged in recent years. This is also the first collection entirely devoted to the problems of reversibility in natural language processing. Most papers collected in this volume are derived from presentations at a workshop held at the University of California at Berkeley in the summer of 1991 organised under the auspices of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This book will be a valuable reference to researchers in linguistics and computer science with interests in computational linguistics, natural language processing, and machine translation, as well as in practical aspects of computability.

This book marks a new development in the field of second language acquisition research. It explores the way in which language processing mechanisms shape the course of language development. Language Processing and Second Language Development thus adds one major psychological component to the search for a theory of second language acquisition. The core of the book is Pienemann’s Processability Theory which spells out which second language forms are processable at which developmental stage. The theory is based on recent research into language processing and is formalised within Lexical-Functional Grammar. The predictions of the theory are applied to the second language development of English, German, Japanese and Swedish. The theory is also tested in on-line experiments. In addition, Processability Theory has major implications for interlanguage variation (including task variation) and age-related differences in language acquisition. All of these issues are explored from a processing perspective with theoretical and empirical rigor.

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured. This book is a new edition of http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/25 and http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/195.