Linguistic Productivity in Neural Networks: Representation and Inductive BiasA fundamental fact about human language is its productivity: speakers are able to understand and produce forms different from those that they have previously encountered. Linguists typically account for this fact by positing abstract grammars that characterize structural representations for an infinity of possible forms. At the...

computational, syntax

It's About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tenseMaura O'Leary (UCLA)It has been well established that the property times of verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, participle phrases, and relative clauses are all interpreted relative to the time argument introduced by the nearest scoping lambda abstractor (e.g., Abusch 1988, Percus 2000, Ogihara 2003, Keshet 2008)...

A very complicated issue in understanding morpho-phonological alternations concerns those phenomena that are pervasive, frequent, and phonotactically-motivated, and yet exceptionful and lexically-sensitive. To what extent are such processes, that apply idiosyncratically to different morphemes, words and even phrases, represented in a way that generalizes to novel forms? This talk examines this issue via the “well-plowed ground”*...

Theories of language acquisition have typically been developed using an idealization of the phonetic learning problem.  For example, phonetic category learning models have used input that is much less variable than the speech children hear and have assumed that learners already know which dimensions of the speech signal to pay attention to.  In this talk,...