Language, Mind, and Brainby Ewa Dabrowska

Chapter 8: On rules and regularity, pt. 2

6. The Polish genitive: an inflectional system without a default

• Masculine nouns can have either Gsg ending of –a or –u, and neither acts as a default. There seem to be semantic, morphological, and phonological factors involved. Special circumstances in table 8.1 do not identify a default. So all masculine nouns have irregular endings.

‘The Polish language is loveable’

6.3 Adult productivity with Gsg

• According to dual-mechanism model, people should do better with fem and neut (regular) nonce words than with masc, but the opposite is true.

6.4 Acquisition of the genitive inflection

• According to dual-mechanism model, children should acquire regular and irregular patterns differently (regular should have a strong onset, irregular should be gradual), but that is not the case.

7. The final test case: The Polish dative

• Q: The formation of the Gsg for neuters is regular, so why do both children and adults have a hard time with it?

7. The final test case: The Polish dative

• Q: The formation of the Gsg for neuters is regular, so why do both children and adults have a hard time with it?

• A. The neuter nouns are mostly packed into a few phonological shapes, rather than being broadly distributed across the potential spectrum. It may be that speakers just go with those common types and never create a fully abstract generalization (a rule) to cover all of them.

8. Interim conclusions

• Q: What seems to be the preferred method for linguistic generalizations?

8. Interim conclusions

• Q: What seems to be the preferred method for linguistic generalizations?

• A: Local, low-level generalizations are more robust than abstract rules, and people store both the inflected forms and the citation forms for many familiar words. The same information may be represented redundantly at different levels of abstraction.

9. Challenges for connectionism

• Q: What are the advantages of the connectionist model?

9. Challenges for connectionism

• Q: What are the advantages of the connectionist model?

• A:– Neurologically more plausible processing than

serial (ordered rule) computation– Simulate learning, including low-level

generalizations, sensitivity to frequency, patterning at various levels of abstraction

9. Challenges for connectionism

• Q: Is it really possible to figure out whether a word is related to another one based only on grammatical facts?

9. Challenges for connectionism

• Q: Is it really possible to figure out whether a word is related to another one based only on grammatical facts?

• A: Probably not. One needs access to semantic (and phonological) information as well, as we see in distinguishing between wisdom tooth (type of tooth > teeth) vs. sabre-tooth (type of tiger > -tooths). It all has to do with: CATEGORIZATION!

9. Challenges for connectionism

• Notice that the edges of categories are flexible, as in:– Polish Gsg tenoru (voice) vs. tenora (singer)– louses (bad people) vs. lice– hanged (‘executed’) vs. hung– computer mouses/?mice vs. mice– Ramscar’s findings that semantic similarity

created a strong preference for irregular forms

9. Challenges for connectionism

• Connectionism has limitations, but it is merely a model, and a new one at that. It is hoped that future models will be more realistic. But we also need to remember that connectionist models are only a small part of the picture, which includes theories and empirical studies…