Main description:
This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 21st Annual University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium. Researchers from linguistics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, using many different methods and focusing on many different facts of language, addressed the question of the existence of linguistic rules. Are such rules best seen as convenient tools for the description of languages, or are rules actually invoked by individual language users? Perhaps the most serious challenge to date to the linguistic rule is the development of connectionist architecture. Indeed, these systems must be viewed as a serious challenge to the foundations of all of contemporary linguistics.
Four broad themes emerged from the Milwaukee conference, corresponding to the four parts of the volume. Part I centers on arguments for the existence of symbolic rules in linguistic competence and performance. Part II contains arguments against symbolic rules, presenting connectionist models and other alternatives to the symbolic paradigm. Parts III and IV take up two issues that are central to a number of language researchers: Language acquisition and learnability, and modularity. These issues are addressed from within both rule-based and non-rule-based perspectives.
Contributors: Farrell Ackerman, Michael Barlow, Catherine Best, David Corina, Roberta Corrigan, Kim Daugherty, Bruce Derwing, Jeff Elman, Alice Faber, John Goldsmith, Helen Goodluck, Neil Jacobs, Richard Janda, Brian Joseph, Michael Kac, Alan Kawamoto, Suzanne Kemmer, Susan Lima, Brian MacWhinney, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Gerald Sanders, Hinrich Schutze, Mark Seidenberg, Royal Skousen, Nicholas Sobin, Joseph Stemberger, Gregory Stone, Ann Thyme, Robert Van Valin.
Table of contents:
- Contributors
- The Reality of Linguistic Rules
- I For the Existence of Symbolic Rules
- On the Typology of Grammatical Principles
- A Schema-Based Approach to Grammatical Description
- A Nonpsychological Realist Conception of Linguistic Rules
- An Acceptable Ungrammatical Construction
- Systematic Hyperforeignisms as Maximally External Evidence for Linguistic Rules
- II Alternatives to Rules
- Grammar within a Neural Network
- The Induction of Prosodic Constraints
- Rule-Less Morphology at the Phonology-Lexicon Interface
- Towards Connectionist Lexical Semantics
- Productivity and the English Past Tense
- III Language Acquisition and Learnability
- Current Grammars vs. Rule Driven Guessing in Children's Interpretations of some Complex Sentence Types
- Extraction Restrictions, Competing Theories and the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus
- The Perceptual Infrastructure of Early Phonological Development
- IV Modularity and Related Issues
- The Dinosaurs and the Ring
- Regular and Irregular Morphology and the Psychological Status of Rules of Grammar
- Beyond Rules and Exceptions
- One System or Two to Handle Regulars and Exceptions
- Combining Connectionist and Symbolic Properties in a Single Process
- Finnish Nominal Inflection
- Author Index
- Subject Index
This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 21st Annual University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium. Researchers from linguistics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy, using many different methods and focusing on many different facts of language, addressed the question of the existence of linguistic rules. Are such rules best seen as convenient tools for the description of languages, or are rules actually invoked by individual language users? Perhaps the most serious challenge to date to the linguistic rule is the development of connectionist architecture. Indeed, these systems must be viewed as a serious challenge to the foundations of all of contemporary linguistics.
Four broad themes emerged from the Milwaukee conference, corresponding to the four parts of the volume. Part I centers on arguments for the existence of symbolic rules in linguistic competence and performance. Part II contains arguments against symbolic rules, presenting connectionist models and other alternatives to the symbolic paradigm. Parts III and IV take up two issues that are central to a number of language researchers: Language acquisition and learnability, and modularity. These issues are addressed from within both rule-based and non-rule-based perspectives.
Contributors: Farrell Ackerman, Michael Barlow, Catherine Best, David Corina, Roberta Corrigan, Kim Daugherty, Bruce Derwing, Jeff Elman, Alice Faber, John Goldsmith, Helen Goodluck, Neil Jacobs, Richard Janda, Brian Joseph, Michael Kac, Alan Kawamoto, Suzanne Kemmer, Susan Lima, Brian MacWhinney, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Gerald Sanders, Hinrich Schutze, Mark Seidenberg, Royal Skousen, Nicholas Sobin, Joseph Stemberger, Gregory Stone, Ann Thyme, Robert Van Valin.
Table of contents:
- Contributors
- The Reality of Linguistic Rules
- I For the Existence of Symbolic Rules
- On the Typology of Grammatical Principles
- A Schema-Based Approach to Grammatical Description
- A Nonpsychological Realist Conception of Linguistic Rules
- An Acceptable Ungrammatical Construction
- Systematic Hyperforeignisms as Maximally External Evidence for Linguistic Rules
- II Alternatives to Rules
- Grammar within a Neural Network
- The Induction of Prosodic Constraints
- Rule-Less Morphology at the Phonology-Lexicon Interface
- Towards Connectionist Lexical Semantics
- Productivity and the English Past Tense
- III Language Acquisition and Learnability
- Current Grammars vs. Rule Driven Guessing in Children's Interpretations of some Complex Sentence Types
- Extraction Restrictions, Competing Theories and the Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus
- The Perceptual Infrastructure of Early Phonological Development
- IV Modularity and Related Issues
- The Dinosaurs and the Ring
- Regular and Irregular Morphology and the Psychological Status of Rules of Grammar
- Beyond Rules and Exceptions
- One System or Two to Handle Regulars and Exceptions
- Combining Connectionist and Symbolic Properties in a Single Process
- Finnish Nominal Inflection
- Author Index
- Subject Index