tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post8687169013723462213..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Syntax in the brainNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-86496768923886399602013-10-14T10:41:20.101-07:002013-10-14T10:41:20.101-07:00I guess my worry was more general: do we really th...I guess my worry was more general: do we really think that what's going on here is that we are assigning features on the fly that we are then checking. I am not sure that this is the right way to think of it. At any rate, if we can always assign features on the fly then there is no sense in which these features are localized to LIs, or so it seems to me.<br /><br />As for the second question: the material was very primitive. No ambiguities that I could see. Maybe the next set of experiments will go there. At least behaviorally, it strikes me that I find your J sentence ambiguous in the same way as a non J sentence. Don't you? Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-17655309290487144162013-10-14T08:44:41.261-07:002013-10-14T08:44:41.261-07:00I don't see how these results are any more at ...I don't see how these results are any more at odds with GL than any other linguistic formalism. The task is to put nonce words into specific syntactic categories. GL only makes the set of categories more fine grained, but it has no impact on the nature of the task. The basic algorithm: look at the functional words and their subcategorization frame, assign categories to complements accordingly. And this algorithm does not care if you specified subcategorization via features or constraints (if anything, it's easier with the former).<br /><br />What I would like to see tested:<br />1) What happens when functional words are replaced rather than open-class items? Since Merge uses exact feature matching (and functional words are small in number but very high frequency), this task should be just as easy as the first, if not easier. But it's probably harder. Maybe because Merge does not use exact matching, maybe because functional words still encode something like basic semantics ("x did y to z with u during v") and the human parser relies a lot on semantics for pruning down the search space.<br />2) Related to the semantics issue, are test participants sensitive to structural ambiguity? Do they entertain multiple structures for "I sixed the nark with a lorospok"?Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07629445838597321588noreply@blogger.com