A Sample Material of my Book LANGUAGE, MIND AND COMPUTATION

Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics - TeachCL '08, 2008

Computational modeling of human language processes is a small but growing subfield of computational linguistics. This paper describes a course that makes use of recent research in psychocomputational modeling as a framework to introduce a number of mainstream computational linguistics concepts to an audience of linguistics, cognitive science and computer science doctoral students. The emphasis on what I take to be the largely interdisciplinary nature of computational linguistics is particularly germane for the computer science students. Since 2002 the course has been taught three times under the auspices of the MA/PhD program in Linguistics at The City University of New York's Graduate Center. A brief description of some of the students' experiences after having taken the course is also provided.

Synthese, 1978

Linguists conceive of grammar in much the same manner as all of us perceive the ambiguous figure of the rabbit/duck. Looked at in one way, grammars are abstract mathematical objects, statable within axiomatic systems, and susceptible to the techniques of logical analysis. There are as many different grammars as there are sets of primitive expressions, formation rules, and rules of interpretation. As with our knowledge of other abstract objects, the thoughts of human beings may be radically imperfect characterizations of the languages represented in thought. It happens that a tiny fraction of these abstract objects are used by members of our species to communicate. The role of human activity is not to determine the nature of a language so much as to determine which language it is that human beings use. Languages, like numbers, exist independently of thought. Yet linguists can reorient their vision, and see the duck's bill of grammar as a bunny's ear. Thus transformed, grammars are psychological entities whose natures are determined by the mental contents of certain human beings. Given this connection between thought and language, it is impossible that competent speakers of English should have internalized rules that only imperfectly represent the grammar of English. 1 If speakers of English were never subject to memory lapses, slips of the tongue, limitations of attention and computation space (that is, if we abstract from those factors that linguists lump together under the rubric of performance), then English would simply be what English speakers can do. The relationship between these two kinds of approaches is old and unfriendly. Platonism and conceptualism are alternative and incompatible theories in many problem areas; the dispute among philosophers of mathematics over the nature of number provides an obvious example. Within philosophy of language itself, Frege formulated a now classic argument for shunning the psychological interpretation of grammar. For Frege, the nature of a language must be something that all speakers of that language have in common, and Frege thought that at the level of psychology, they have nothing of interest in common. Frege's variability argument encapsulates a

Journal of Pragmatics, 1992

Biolinguistics, 2014

This book, part of the Oxford Studies in Biolinguistic series, presents a state-ofthe-art overview of the field, more specifically, on psycho-and neurolinguistics and their relation to models of syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology, while advancing its limits with cutting-edge research. A distinctive feature of the piece is the strong presence of interdisciplinary work and the internal coherence of the volume, integrating computational science, cognitive science, neurology and psycholinguistics, as well as syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology; an integration that is most welcomed as it triggers debate and productive revisiting of the machinery assumed within all aforementioned sub-disciplines of linguistics. The volume is organized around the notion of garden path sentences, relative clauses, and their relations at the processing level; this includes major problems of natural language processing and the relations between syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology from a more general point of view as well. The editors have chosen to open the book with a reprinted article by Thomas Bever, from 1970 (which becomes a recurrent motif to which the contributors refer once and again as a departing point, thus giving structural and thematic unity and coherence to the book as a whole), a locus classicus for the psycholinguistic and neurocognitive approaches to ambiguity resolution, parsing (sentence perception, at the moment) strategies, and so-called 'garden path sentences' (GPS), the best known example being The horse raced past the barn fell, even if, as Tanenhaus claims in the Afterword, none of those is the prime theme of the work (but it is mostly about the relation between language and general cognitive strategies, an early plea for holism). The opening seems appropriate, since it provides the reader with an overall perspective on the studies of language as a concept analogous to those of "species or organ, as they are used in biological science" (p. 2). The article makes a case of distinguishing language as a mental/biological entity from language as a behavior; but, crucially, language structure and development are not to be isolated from the development of other cognitive capacities. Choosing this particular article is a statement in itself: Perceptual mechanisms, cognitive structures (including counting and number approximation, visual patterns and 2-D/3-D illusions), and linguistic structures (grammatical role assignment, abstraction of a structural pattern like 'active' or

Journal of Pragmatics, 1979