Features Of Natural Language Research Articles

Where the regress argument still goes wrong: reply to Knowles

The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOT) is at the centre of a number of the most fundamental debates about the mind. Yet many philosophers want to reject LOT out of hand on the grounds that it is essentially a recidivistic doctrine, one that has long since been refuted. According to these philosophers, LOT is subject to a devastating regress argument. There are several versions of the argument, but the basic idea is as follows. (1) Natural language has some important feature, X.1 (2) Defenders of LOT appeal to an internal system of representation in order to explain this feature of natural language. (3) Yet the hypothesized language of thought also has X. (4) This raises the following dilemma: If we offer an analogous explanation of the language of thought’s having X, we are off on a regress. If we offer some other explanation, then the alternative explanation should have been given for natural language in the first place, avoiding the detour through the language of thought. In Laurence and Margolis (1997), we argued that even the most ardent supporters of LOT have been too generous in their responses to the Regress Argument; when seen in the proper light, the Regress Argument itself does nothing at all to impugn LOT. The crucial point is that the Regress Argument gains its rhetorical force from the tacit assumption that the only point to positing a language of thought is to address the explanandum cited in the regress. For suppose that there are independent motivations for positing a language of thought – that is, motivations apart from explaining how natural language has feature X. In that case, the LOT theorist is free to appeal to the language of thought in accounting for natural language possessing feature X, but she is not required to. Presumably, she should appeal to the language of thought if doing so has theoretical advantages over explaining feature X of natural language directly. And it can be argued that explaining feature X by reference to the language of thought does have many advantages, even though the language of thought itself has feature X. LOT theorists have jumped on this point, effectively challenging the second horn of the dilemma. However, this response grants far too much to the regress argument. For

The Grammar of Sign Language

Sign languages are natural visual-gestural languages comparable to other natural spoken languages. Although sign languages share many common universal features, considerable variation may be found amongst them. In this article the phonology, morphology, syntax and certain discourse features of sign languages and other natural languages are compared. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that both spoken and signed languages involve similar processes and rules regardless of the languages' modalities.

Circuit II—A conversational graphical interface

The research presented in this paper attempts to demonstrate that a graphical interface can provide some of the same functionality of natural language when dialogue takes place between conversational participants. An overview of a graphically interactive system, Circuit II, is provided which uses a general-purpose electronic simulator, MITEYSPICE (McCabe D.J., MITEYSPICE Circuit Simulator User Guide. Those Engineers, London (1988); Ref. [1]) to model an audio video amplifier circuit. Circuit II provides users with a graphical representation of an electronic circuit within which they pose simple and complex questions using direct manipulation techniques. The graphical environment, based on Reichman's communication paradigm for a window system, supports a noun-verb and/or verb-noun syntax through which users mouse selections are interpreted. This work seeks to demonstrate how certain mouse selection combinations, expressed within Circuit II, have roles analogous to certain natural language features, particularly anaphora, ellipsis and deixis.

Incorporation in Universal Grammar: a case study in theoretical reductionism

Over the past three decades there has been a pervasive tendency in linguistic theorizing, especially in syntactic theory, towards theoretical reductionism; that is, theorists have attempted either to reduce complex phenomena to a single unitary phenomenon or to explain phenomena in terms of a small number of unifying principles of some kind. Reduction of complex phenomena or principles to simpler, better understood ones is a natural part of scientific explanation, but the danger in this course lies in 'overreduction' to the point where the phenomena or the principles become distorted; determining the correct reduction is an important consideration in explanatory scientific theories. The reduction of linguistic phenomena can be seen first in the reduction of the scope of linguistics from language to grammar (Chomsky, I 98 i) and, second, in the assumption of the autonomy of syntax. Complex semantic and pragmatic features of natural language are either excluded from the stipulated domain of linguistics or are treated as syntactic. A good example of this is the postulation of D-structure in Government-Binding (GB) theory and the initial stratum in Relational Grammar (RG) as a 'thematically pure' representation of the semantic argument structure of a verb. That is, semantic role distinctions are represented formally in syntactic structure by either structural configurations or grammatical relations, and rules affecting these arguments apply to their syntactic representations, thereby avoiding any direct reference to their semantic representations, which are often dispensed with altogether. The opposite of this is the Generative Semantics position, which maintained that

Raising in Berber

Raising in Berber has been selected for study for two main reasons: firstly, this syntactic operation which has hardly received any attention up to now involves areas which are central to the understanding of the whole syntactic structure of Berber. Secondly, Raising in general is considered by Chomsky and most linguists as being a universal feature of natural languages. However, although Chomsky does not question the existence of Raising to Subject, which he subsumes under the general rule of NP movement, he seems to strongly reject the rule of Raising to Object, claiming that what this rule does can easily be carried out by means of one of his constraints, the "Tensed S Constraint". The goals of the present paper are twofold: the one hand, it aims to show that although Chomsky considers Raising to Subject as an essentially movement rule, this rule seems to operate in Berber without syntactic movement. On the other hand, the paper aims to show that Chomsky's theoretical suggestions in the domain of Raising to Object are highly questionable, if not utterly wrong. A number of arguments supporting these two views are based on Berber data.

Rediscovering debates in the international studies: Morton Kaplan's system epistemology revisited

In this four-part paper I attempt to ‘recover’ the notion of debate as a ‘method’ of philosophical analysis for the international studies. In part one, it is argued that discursive reasoning is indispensable to the task of attempting to say what international relations might consist in. Three reasons are given for this, viz., that there is an important connection between such debates and rationality; that it is a constitutive feature of natural language to want to use it for self-conscious reflections; and that it seems to be the only way of identifying the key concepts in terms of which any theorizing about international relations is to be expressed. Parts two and three are intended to show one of the uses to which discursive reasoning may be put in establishing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the incoherence of Morton Kaplan's systems epistemology for international relations. Establishing the incoherence of one conception of what international relations consists in will go one step closer towards saying more fully what international relations is. Part four suggests, but does not attempt to make compelling, that an Aristotelian conception of the subject matter is a quite defensible one.

The grammaticality of manual representations of English in classroom settings.

This study examined the ability of teachers to produce grammatical manual representations of English under normal classroom conditions. Three groups of teachers—inexperienced signing hearing teachers, experienced signing hearing teachers, and deaf teachers—were observed three times using a live-observation system. Twenty-three teachers were observed with an inter-coder reliability of .896. Differences in teachers' ability to use separate signs for English grammatical endings and the use of ASL-like signing were found. The general conclusion of the study is that increased experience leads to increased use of natural language features in classroom communication.

The natural language of interactive systems

The work reported here stems from our deep belief that improved human engineering can add significantly to the acceptance and use of computer technology. In particular, this report describes an experiment to test the hypothesis that certain features of natural language provide a useful guide for the human engineering of interactive command languages. The goal was to establish that a syntax employing familiar, descriptive, everyday words and well-formed English phrases contributes to a language that can be easily and effectively used. Users with varying degrees of interactive computing experience used two versions of an interactive text editor; one with an English-based command syntax in the sense described above, the other with a more notational syntax. Performance differences strongly favored the English-based editor.

Davidson on Learnable Languages

Davidson, like Chomsky, looks to certain features of natural languages to decipher what makes them learnable. Quine, on the other hand, suggests that the constraints on learnability come more from learning theory than from the structure of our languages. My aims are to show that Davidson's requirements on learnability are too strong and that he has not shown that his theory of meaning explains the learnability of language. A more broadly empiricist approach to both language learning and to language seems more congenial.