Toward a Dynamical Interpretation of Hierarchical Linguistic Structure

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2009) Toward a dynamical interpretation of hierarchical linguistic structure Sam Tilsen 1. Introduction Hierarchy is one of the most important concepts in the scientific understanding of language. From early structuralist approaches of the mid-1800s, through the paradigm shift to generative grammar in the mid-1900s, and onward to the present, connected-object (“branching”) schemas have been used to represent hierarchical constituency relations between linguistic units. Syntactic trees are the most prominent instantiation of such schemas, but similar arboreal schemas have been applied extensively in nearly all domains of linguistic theory. Recently, an alternative conception of hierarchical structure has arisen, which is based upon interactions between waves, or coupled oscillatory systems. This paper presents a synthesis and extension of such approaches, with the aim of advancing a general wave theory of linguistic structure. This wave theory provides a coherent conceptualization of diverse linguistic phenomena, is cognitively plausible, and is a parsimonious theory. Many syntactic and phonological patterns in language can be understood to arise from general principles of wave interaction. Section 1.1 will consider how hierarchy has traditionally been conceptualized and represented in linguistics, and section 1.2 will describe some previous research which leads the way to a wave-based, dynamical systems perspective on linguistic structure. Section 2 will introduce some general principles regarding how hierarchical structure can be conceptualized with dynamical systems, beginning with systems of two waves, then treating systems of three waves, which can be generalized to more complex systems. This is followed in section 3 by several applications of the theory to phonological and syntactic patterns. These include an examination of how segments interact with syllables and how stress interacts with words, as well as a proposal for dynamical modeling of recursive syntactic patterns and syntactic dislocation phenomena. Section 4 concludes with a discussion of the cognitive plausibility of this approach, and delineates some issues to guide further development of the theory. 1.1 Hierarchical Structure In this paper we are interested in a structural notion of hierarchy, in which concepts of ranking, relation, and containment play important roles. In order to organize our