tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post2742120551585610959..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Lifted from the comments on 'Mother knows best.'Norberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-9123300972418820732013-11-04T07:16:46.729-08:002013-11-04T07:16:46.729-08:00And, Takahashi's thesis also contains a connec...And, Takahashi's thesis also contains a connectionist model that fails to learn what 18-month-olds infants learned.Jeff Lidzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02662307721892528218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-76885732275812530272013-11-04T06:43:31.580-08:002013-11-04T06:43:31.580-08:00I don't think I see which criticism of APL app...I don't think I see which criticism of APL applies to the Mitchener & Becker paper. The thing that I think you are missing is that what that paper shows is that there are learning mechanisms that can identify the two classes. What it doesn't show is that anything follows from those classifications, which is the UG contribution. As Norbert said in an earlier post, in order to identify the UG contribution you have to see what the distinction is used for. In the case of raising/control, there are a host of properties that are related to the distinction, yielding the following contrasts (which you could find in any decent intro to syntax textbook):<br /><br />1) Idiom chunk asymmetries:<br />The shit is likely to hit the fan<br />*The shit is trying to hit the fan<br /><br />2) "there-insertion" asymmetries<br />There is likely to be a riot<br />*There is trying to be a riot<br /><br />3) Synonymy under passive asymmetries<br />CBS is likely to interview John = John is likely to be interviewed by CBS<br />CBS is trying to interview John ≠ John is trying to be interviewed by CBS<br /><br />4) Use of expletive 'it'<br />John is likely to leave. <br />It is likely that John will leave<br />John is trying to leave<br />*It is trying that John will leave<br /><br />5) +/- selectional restrictions on surface subject<br />The rock is likely to roll down the hill<br />*The rock is trying to roll down the hill<br /><br />The fact that a learning mechanism can identify that there are two classes does not guarantee that this set of properties are diagnostic of the classes. For that, you need a syntactic theory that connects all the facts up, which is what UG provides. On the UG story that (I think) Becker is offering, the learner is equipped with two classes from which these facts follow. What the distributional evidence does is to help the learner identify which verbs fall into which classes. This is precisely the sort of thing that a theory of UG is supposed to be good for, i.e., (a) making facts that aren't in the experience of the learner fall out from facts that are in the experience of the learner and (b) making clusters of facts that wouldn't necessarily have to covary covary.Jeff Lidzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02662307721892528218noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-50611468592035018762013-11-04T04:10:34.274-08:002013-11-04T04:10:34.274-08:00Maybe it would be worth discussing some of these e...Maybe it would be worth discussing some of these examples. I think Misha Becker's work is maybe the best to talk about, for example Mitchener and Becker (2011) (DOI 10.1007/s11168-011-9073-6) -- this actually appeared in a special issue that I edited so obviously I think it is a good paper, and I have discussed these issues with Misha, but I don't want to claim that she agrees with me. <br /><br />So this paper concerns the acquisition of the raising/control distinction; broadly speaking on the acquisition of verb subcategorisation frames. And it is a modeling paper which is what we need in this case.<br />The paper looks at various learning algorithms that could be used to acquire this distinction from certain inputs. In particular the learner knows already about what verbs and nouns are and has some other syntactic and semantic knowledge. <br />In the context of this discussion the question then is<br />a) what are the learning approaches that acquire that other syntactic knowledge? i.e. how do they learn which words are nouns and which are verbs?<br />and <br />b) are those learning mechanisms capable of learning the raising/control distinction?<br /><br />Now neither of these issues are discussed really in the paper, if I recall correctly.<br />So this paper is vulnerable to the APL critique as well; or at least it certainly doesn't offer any counterarguments.<br /><br /><br /><br />The Takahashi paper is an AGL paper not a modelling paper so I don't think that is relevant either (I have only read Takahashi and Lidz 2007, so apologies if this is very different from the thesis?). <br />Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-68432296501432752822013-11-01T10:18:01.688-07:002013-11-01T10:18:01.688-07:00Just to clarify: that quote is from a paper *by* J...Just to clarify: that quote is from a paper *by* Jeff Lidz: called "Language Learning and Language Universals" in Biolinguistics which is freely available, and much of which which I agree with. <br />Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.com