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"Productivity (Linguistics)"
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Linguistic generalization and compositionality in modern artificial neural networks
In the last decade, deep artificial neural networks have achieved astounding performance in many natural language-processing tasks. Given the high productivity of language, these models must possess effective generalization abilities. It is widely assumed that humans handle linguistic productivity by means of algebraic compositional rules: are deep networks similarly compositional? After reviewing the main innovations characterizing current deep language-processing networks, I discuss a set of studies suggesting that deep networks are capable of subtle grammar-dependent generalizations, but also that they do not rely on systematic compositional rules. I argue that the intriguing behaviour of these devices (still awaiting a full understanding) should be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists, as it offers a new perspective on possible computational strategies to deal with linguistic productivity beyond rule-based compositionality, and it might lead to new insights into the less systematic generalization patterns that also appear in natural language.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition’.
Journal Article
Attack of the snowclones: A corpus-based analysis of extravagant formulaic patterns
The concept of ‘snowclones’ has gained interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies of extravagance and expressiveness in language. However, no clear criteria for identifying snowclones have yet been established, and detailed corpus-based investigations of the phenomenon are still lacking. This paper addresses this research gap in a twofold way. On the one hand, we develop an operational definition of snowclones, arguing that three criteria are decisive: (i) the existence of a lexically fixed source construction; (ii) partial productivity; (iii) ‘extravagant’ formal and/or functional characteristics. On the other hand, we offer an empirical investigation of two patterns that have often been mentioned as examples of snowclones in the previous literature, namely [the mother of all X] and [X BE the new Y]. We use collostructional analysis and distributional semantics to explore the partial productivity of both patterns’ slot fillers. In sum, we argue that the concept of snowclones, if properly defined, can contribute substantially to our understanding of creative language use, especially regarding the question of how social, cultural, and interpersonal factors influence the choice of more or less salient linguistic constructions.
Journal Article
The role of coercion in the productivity and creativity of complex verb formation: a constructional approach
This article examines the notions of productivity and creativity with respect to complex verbs in English. Verb-forming suffixation involves the attachment of the suffixes ‑ ize , ‑ify , - en and - ate to a base to form complex verbs such as hospitalize , densify , sharpen and hyphenate. Sampson (2016) describes productive processes that conform to existing patterns as F-creativity, or Fixed-creativity, and those that deviate from those patterns as E-creativity, or Enlarging/Extending creativity; Bergs (2018) and Uhrig (2018) view the F–E dichotomy as a cline. Coercion effects can account for linguistic productivity and creativity; Audring & Booij (2016) propose that the coercive mechanisms of Selection, Enrichment and Override lie on a unified continuum. This article integrates the F–E creativity and coercion continua, and analyses a database of conventionalized and recently coined complex verbs (Laws 2023) for instances of coercion. The results reveal that coercive mechanisms, particularly Selection and Enrichment, facilitate productivity and creativity in more complex constructional schemas underlying verbal derivatives, and that these coercive patterns have become increasingly more entrenched over time. E-creativity of complex verbs is defined here as ‘Unruly’ coercion and the nature of attested examples is discussed.
Journal Article
Explaining microvariation using the Tolerance Principle: plugging the amn’t gap
In this article, we describe and explain patterns of variation in acceptance of amn’t in varieties of Scots, drawing upon data from the Scots Syntax Atlas. Partly in line with findings from Bresnan (2001), we show that amn’t is much more widely accepted in inversion environments (amn’t I?) than in declaratives (I amn’t), but nevertheless, amn’t in declaratives is still accepted in certain regions of Scotland. We combine the productivity-based explanation of the amn’t gap in Yang (2016, 2017) with new insights into the syntax of Scots negation from Thoms et al. (2023) to provide a predictive account of the attested variation.
Journal Article
Gender and lexical distribution of subject-characterizing -ly adverbs?
Subject-orientation and subject-relatedness have been defined as properties of adverbs that have the ability to characterize the subject, the former simultaneously with the expression of adverbial meaning as circumstance. According to the definition of subject-related -ly adverbs as subject-oriented adverbs that can only characterize the subject, subject-relatedness would be expected to be dependent on subject-orientation, also because it is farthest from the prototypical function and meaning of -ly words and well into the prototypical function and meaning of adjectives. As this syntactic and semantic behavior is not signaled formally, it parallels, in principle, what happens in conversion, where syntactic transposition is without phonological change. Based on the evidence of 29,759 bigrams extracted by lemma from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this paper analyzes the genre distribution of subject-oriented and subject-related -ly words, and their most relevant lexical features. The results show similarities and also differences in the behavior of subject-orientation and subject-relatedness as regards text genre distribution and in their formation from various types of adjectival bases. The interpretations of these results are manifold, within and outside word-formation processes.
Journal Article
The Emergence of an Abstract Grammatical Category in Children's Early Speech
How do children begin to use language to say things they have never heard before? The origins of linguistic productivity have been a subject of heated debate: Whereas generativist accounts posit that children's early language reflects the presence of syntactic abstractions, constructivist approaches instead emphasize gradual generalization derived from frequently heard forms. In the present research, we developed a Bayesian statistical model that measures the degree of abstraction implicit in children's early use of the determiners \"a\" and \"the.\" Our work revealed that many previously used corpora are too small to allow researchers to judge between these theoretical positions. However, several data sets, including the Speechome corpus—a new ultra-dense data set for one child—showed evidence of low initial levels of productivity and higher levels later in development. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that children lack rich grammatical knowledge at the outset of language learning but rapidly begin to generalize on the basis of structural regularities in their input.
Journal Article
How tight is the link between alternations and phonotactics?
This study tests the hypothesis that alternation patterns with strong lexical support are more robust than those with no, or weak, lexical support. Focusing on three alternation patterns in Korean with varying productivity and generality, we measured lexical support in two ways. First, we conducted an acceptability-rating experiment investigating Korean speakers’ judgements on non-words with and without violations of the phonotactic constraints motivating the alternations. In addition, we performed a simulation of learning a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) Harmonic Grammar from a dictionary corpus. The results of the experiment and computational modelling confirmed the hypothesis by showing that if an alternation is robust, its associated phonotactic constraint is learned with a high weight from the MaxEnt simulation, and it affects the participants’ well-formedness ratings for non-words. Consequently, the results of this research support the claim of a tight link between alternations and phonotactics.
Journal Article
Unravelling Lexical and Narrative Patterns in the Hikayat Lonthoir: A Computational Linguistics Approach
Hikayat Lonthoir, a rare saga manuscript collection originating from the Banda Archipelago, Maluku, Indonesia, retains significant Indigenous oral history amidst the Western colonial narrative. This study seeks to leverage computational methods to analyze the historic manuscript that constitutes a combination of OCR-supervised transcription, corpus linguistic profiling, semantic clustering (Word2Vec + K-Means), and named entity network analysis. A validation of the dataset is performed on 2793 cleaned word tokens towards Indonesian and Malay dictionaries, showing that 50.3% overlapped with both dictionaries, with strong cross-dictionary agreement (κ = 0.76). The lexical analysis indicates that monarchy/governance, kinship, maritime vocabulary, and extensive morphological productivity (me-, di-, ter-, pe-/per-, -nya, -an), while semantic and network analyses identify two narrative cores, developed into Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) and Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature classification systems. These findings demonstrate how computational methods can extract structural, thematic, and relational patterns from historical manuscripts and contribute evidence-based insights to digital philology and historical linguistics.
Journal Article
Productive phrasal opacity in Gua: A challenge to Stratal Optimality Theory
We present new evidence for a special opaque interaction between phonological processes in Gua, a nearly endangered Guang (Niger-Congo) language spoken in eastern Ghana. This interaction, which was first observed by Obiri-Yeboah (
2021
), is between ATR vowel harmony and hiatus-resolution processes that render harmony opaque. A few properties of this interaction make it special. First, ATR harmony and hiatus resolution interact productively across arbitrary combinations of words. We show this using grammatical-yet-nonsensical Gua sentences akin to Chomsky’s (
1957
)
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
, which could not have been memorized by speakers. This makes the interaction a clear case of opacity acquired by speakers. Second, the interaction involves multiple kinds of opacity in different derivations—specifically, counterbleeding, (self-)counterfeeding, and the recently labeled “countershifting” (Rasin
2022
)—which pose a challenge to nonserial phonological theories like Parallel Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky
1993/2004
). Stratal Optimality Theory (Bermúdez-Otero
1999
; Kiparsky
2000
,
2015
) is a serial version of Optimality Theory that attempts to account for opacity by assigning opaquely interacting processes to different serially ordered strata. A central prediction of Stratal Optimality Theory is that opacity should correlate with morphosyntactic structure, because strata are limited to morphological or syntactic domains (Jaker and Kiparsky
2020
). Building on Obiri-Yeboah and Rose (
2022
), we provide new evidence that ATR harmony and hiatus resolution in Gua apply only once to the entire utterance and thus cannot be attributed to different morphosyntactic domains, suggesting that Stratal Optimality Theory’s limited serialism is insufficient for solving the opacity problem for Optimality Theory, and that a purely phonological mechanism for deriving opacity is needed.
Journal Article