The Price of Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language

by Charles Yang

Overview

An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages.

All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exceptions falling below a critical threshold. 

Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, Yang's Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire rules of language that perplex otherwise capable adults. His focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262035323
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	10/14/2016
Series:	The MIT Press
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles Yang teaches Linguistics and Computer Science and directs the Program in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language and The Infinite Gift, and is currently writing a book on language change.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

1 Border Wars 1

1.1 How Grammars Leak 2

1.2 Where Core Meets Periphery 5

1.3 Some Outstanding Problems 9

2 The Inevitability of Rules 15

2.1 Statistical Profiles of Grammar 15

2.1.1 The Long Tail 17

2.1.2 Quantifying Sparsity 21

2.1.3 Distributional Sparsity and Language Learning 22

2.2 Interlude: Irregular Rules and Irregular Verbs 26

2.3 Productivity in Child Language 31

2.3.1 The Wug Test 31

2.3.2 Regularization vs. Irregularization in English 33

2.3.3 Productivity across Languages 34

3 The Tipping Point 41

3.1 Learning by Generalization 41

3.2 The Cost of Exceptions 45

3.3 Elsewhere in Language Processing 49

3.3.1 Listing Exceptions 50

3.3.2 Exceptions before Rules 52

3.4 The Tolerance Principle 60

3.5 Remarks 66

3.5.1 Smaller Is Better 66

3.5.2 Types, Tokens, and Artificial Languages 67

3.5.3 Effective Vocabulary and Variation 69

3.5.4 Recursive Tolerance and Structured Rules 71

3.5.5 Structures and Statistics 75

4 Signal and Noise 79

4.1 When Felt Becomes Feeled 81

4.1.1 Evaluating Irregulars 83

4.1.2 Adam, Eve. and Abe 87

4.1.3 Why Are Noun Plurals Easier to Learn? 91

4.2 A Recursive Approach to Stress 93

4.2.1 A Sketch of English Stress 94

4.2.2 Prosodic Development and Learnability 96

4.2.3 Stage Transitions in Stress Acquisition 99

4.3 The Mysteries of Nominabzation 106

4.3.1 Productivity and Frequency 107

4.3.2 Form Proposes, Meaning Disposes, Tolerance Decides 109

4.3.3 Evaluating Nominalization Suffixes 112

4.4 The Horrors of German: Exceptions that Force the Rules 121

4.4.1 More Regularity After All 121

4.4.2 How to Find Subregularities 125

4.4.3 German Plurals: A Recap 133

5 When Language Fails 139

5.1 Finding Gaps 140

5.1.1 Stride, Strode, *Stridden 143

5.1.2 Stem Alternations in Spanish 147

5.1.3 Defective Inflections in Russian 152

5.1.4 The Indeterminacy of Polish Masculine Genitives 154

5.2 The Rise and Fall of Productivity 157

5.3 Diagnosing Sickness 160

5.3.1 The Symptoms 160

5.3.2 Predicting Case Substitution 165

5.3.3 The Actuation of Change 166

6 The Logic of Evidence 171

6.1 Inference and Weight of Evidence 172

6.1.1 Indeterminacy 172

6.1.2 Indirect Negative Evidence 174

6.1.3 Sufficiency of Positive Evidence 177

6.2 Why Are There No Asleep Cats? 180

6.2.1 The Failure of Indirect Negative Evidence 181

6.2.2 A-adjectives Are Not Atypical 184

6.2.3 Generalization with Sufficient Evidence 187

6.3 Resolving Baker's Paradox 190

6.3.1 Conditions on Dative Constructions 191

6.3.2 How to Text Me a Message 198

6.3.3 Beyond the First Years of Life 206

7 On Language Design 215

7.1 Computational Efficiency in Language Acquisition 215

7.2 Core and Periphery Revisited 218

7.3 The Ecology of Language Learning 223

Bibliography 229

Index 257

What People are Saying About This

Elissa L. Newport

Charles Yang's book is full of new insights into enduring questions.For decades our colleagues have debated about rules and exceptions—are there really 'rules' in mental representations, or is everything stored as lexical information, exemplars, instances? The Price of Linguistic Productivity provides new data showing that in fact children make a categorical distinction between these two types of representation—and, most important, an insightful computational account of when each will be formed. The Tolerance Principle not only accounts for findings in scores of languages; it also makes new predictions about nonlinguistic concepts—that is, when a generalization will occur in inductive learning, within languages and beyond. This book is a profoundly important contribution to our understanding of language acquisition and of learning.

Mark Steedman

Charles Yang proposes a simple rule relating the number of exceptions that a productive rule of grammar can tolerate to the number of regular cases it generates, and provides a diverse set of case studies, including data concerning the course of child language acquisition. The case-studies suggest that it applies with great generality across languages, and across different distributions of regular and irregular forms.His book will be read by linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and all who are concerned with questions of the fundamental nature of human language.

Mark Aronoff

This is the best linguistics book that I have read in a decade.It presents a simple, elegant solution to the problem of reconciling patterns of regularity and irregularity. A compelling property of Yang's Tolerance Principle is that it works better with small quantities of data, thus providing a novel and insightful answer to those who wonder how children can master a language with so little input. This is a wonderful book and deserves to attract a large audience.

Norbert Hornstein

Charles Yang's new book does something that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime; it makes quantitative predictions in a linguistic domain. And by 'quantitative' I do not mean giving p-values or confidence intervals or rating scores. I mean numerical predictions about the size of a measurable effect; in fact, many, many measurable effects. That's quantitative! So run, don't walk, to your nearest book provider and read the damn thing! It is groundbreaking work.

Endorsement

Charles Yang proposes a simple rule relating the number of exceptions that a productive rule of grammar can tolerate to the number of regular cases it generates, and provides a diverse set of case studies, including data concerning the course of child language acquisition. The case-studies suggest that it applies with great generality across languages, and across different distributions of regular and irregular forms.His book will be read by linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and all who are concerned with questions of the fundamental nature of human language.

—Mark Steedman, Professor of Cognitive Science, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

From the Publisher

This is the best linguistics book that I have read in a decade. It presents a simple, elegant solution to the problem of reconciling patterns of regularity and irregularity. A compelling property of Yang's Tolerance Principle is that it works better with small quantities of data, thus providing a novel and insightful answer to those who wonder how children can master a language with so little input. This is a wonderful book and deserves to attract a large audience.

—Mark Aronoff, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, Stony Brook University; author of Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes

This excellent book addresses a range of extremely important issues, and brings novel arguments to bear on their resolution. It clarifies the elusive distinction between 'core' grammatical facts and the 'periphery'; makes explicit a standard (though typically vague) approach to how inflectional gaps can be acquired; and presents coherent accounts of some perennial analytic conundrums as the status of various plural marking rules in German. It is the most important work I've read in years for the deep basic insights it has to offer on fundamental questions in the theory of grammar.

—Stephen R. Anderson, Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics, Yale University; author of Languages: A Very Short Introduction

Charles Yang's new book does something that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime; it makes quantitative predictions in a linguistic domain. And by 'quantitative' I do not mean giving p-values or confidence intervals or rating scores. I mean numerical predictions about the size of a measurable effect; in fact, many, many measurable effects. That's quantitative! So run, don't walk, to your nearest book provider and read the damn thing! It is groundbreaking work.

—Norbert Hornstein, Professor, Departments of Linguistics, University of Maryland

Charles Yang's book is full of new insights into enduring questions. For decades our colleagues have debated about rules and exceptions—are there really 'rules' in mental representations, or is everything stored as lexical information, exemplars, instances? The Price of Linguistic Productivity provides new data showing that in fact children make a categorical distinction between these two types of representation—and, most important, an insightful computational account of when each will be formed. The Tolerance Principle not only accounts for findings in scores of languages; it also makes new predictions about nonlinguistic concepts—that is, when a generalization will occur in inductive learning, within languages and beyond. This book is a profoundly important contribution to our understanding of language acquisition and of learning.

—Elissa L. Newport, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Linguistics, Georgetown University

Charles Yang proposes a simple rule relating the number of exceptions that a productive rule of grammar can tolerate to the number of regular cases it generates, and provides a diverse set of case studies, including data concerning the course of child language acquisition. The case-studies suggest that it applies with great generality across languages, and across different distributions of regular and irregular forms. His book will be read by linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and all who are concerned with questions of the fundamental nature of human language.

—Mark Steedman, Professor of Cognitive Science, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Stephen R. Anderson

This excellent book addresses a range of extremely important issues, and brings novel arguments to bear on their resolution. It clarifies the elusive distinction between 'core' grammatical facts and the 'periphery'; makes explicit a standard (though typically vague) approach to how inflectional gaps can be acquired; and presents coherent accounts of some perennial analytic conundrums as the status of various plural marking rules in German. It is the most important work I've read in years for the deep basic insights it has to offer on fundamental questions in the theory of grammar.