The Minimal Sign

Blevins, James P.; Hippisley, Andrew R.; Stump, Gregory

doi:10.1017/9781139814720.003

Cited by 9 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The connection between form and meaning can be dynamic and relational, allowing morphological theory to reframe its semiotic legacy. In fact, it has been argued that since its discriminative underpinnings emphasize that language is a system of différence , discriminative learning elegantly carries the discipline back to its Saussurean heritage (Blevins, 2016 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning

Stein

Plag

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Recent evidence for the influence of morphological structure on the phonetic output goes unexplained by established models of speech production and by theories of the morphology-phonology interaction. Linear discriminative learning (LDL) is a recent computational approach in which such effects can be expected. We predict the acoustic duration of 4,530 English derivative tokens with the morphological functions DIS, NESS, LESS, ATION, and IZE in natural speech data by using predictors derived from a linear discriminative learning network. We find that the network is accurate in learning speech production and comprehension, and that the measures derived from it are successful in predicting duration. For example, words are lengthened when the semantic support of the word's predicted articulatory path is stronger. Importantly, differences between morphological categories emerge naturally from the network, even when no morphological information is provided. The results imply that morphological effects on duration can be explained without postulating theoretical units like the morpheme, and they provide further evidence that LDL is a promising alternative for modeling speech production.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning

Stein

Plag

2021

Front. Psychol.

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“…In this study, we challenge a computational implementation of Word and Paradigm Morphology (Blevins, 2016;Matthews & Matthews, 1972), the 'discriminative lexicon' (DL) (Baayen et al, 2019), with the task of modeling the noun system of Maltese, a Semitic language spoken in Europe. The DL model differs from most theories of morphology in that it defines mappings between form and meaning (comprehension) and meaning and form (production) without requiring theoretical constructs such as stems, exponents, and inflectional classes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Discriminative Lexicon Approach to Word Comprehension, Production and Processing: Maltese Plurals

Nieder¹,

Chuang²,

Vijver³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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This study challenges a computational implementation of Word and Paradigm Morphology with the task of modeling the semi-productive noun system of Maltese, which combines a dozen concatenative plural patterns with eleven non-concatenative plural patterns. We show that our model, trained on 6,511 word forms, generates accurate predictions about what meanings listeners understand and what forms speakers produce. Furthermore, measures derived from the model are predictive for Maltese reaction times. Although mathematically very simple, the linear mappings between form and meaning posited by our model are powerful enough to capture the complexity and productivity of the Maltese noun system.

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“…But what if the analysis of complex words into simpler parts proves to be difficult, and, if possible, rather arbitrary (Katamba 1978;Hockett 1954;Blevins 2016a)? In that case speakers could not work out the necessary rules or schemas, which then raises the question by what mechanisms speakers can comprehend and produce complex words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Discriminative Lexicon is a comprehensive theory of the mental lexicon Baayen et al (2018;2019b); Chuang et al (2020b;c; that brings together several strands from independent theories: With word and paradigm theory it shares the hypothesis that words, not morphemes, stems or exponents are the relevant cognitive units (Blevins 2006;2016a); 1 with distributional semantics it shares the hypothesis that words get their meaning in utterances (Firth 1957;Landauer & Dumais 1997;Sahlgren 2008;Weaver 1955); from error-driven learning it implements the hypothesis learning is the result of minimizing prediction errors (Rescorla & Wagner 1972;Widrow & Hoff 1960). 2 From machine learning it incorporates the insight that fully connected neural networks are very successful at language learning (Boersma et al 2020;Magnuson et al 2020;Malouf 2017;Pater 2019;Prickett et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this analogy x must be ndahora. The morphosyntactic features that these forms express, for example, the features first person, singular, active, indicative, present tense and imperfective, are given their interpretation on the basis of their distribution in utterances in which they occur (Blevins 2016a;Firth 1957;Landauer & Dumais 1997;Sahlgren 2008;Weaver 1955). 1 We are aware of the fact that the construct word has its own problems in typology (Haspelmath 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

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How do speakers comprehend and produce complex words? In the theory ofthe Discriminative Lexicon this is hypothesized to be the results of mapping the phonology of whole word forms onto their semantics and vice versa, without recourse to morphemes. This raises the question whether this hypothesis also holds true in highly agglutinative languages, which are oǒten seen to exemplify the compositional nature of morphology. On the one hand, one could expect that the hypothesis for agglutinative languages is correct, since it remains unclear whether speakers are able to isolate the morphemes they need to achieve this. On the other hand, agglutinative languages have so many different words that it is not obvious how speakers can use their knowledge of words to comprehend and produce them.In this paper, we investigate comprehension and production of verbs in Kinyarwanda,an agglutinative Bantu language, by means of computational modeling within the theDiscriminative Lexicon, a theory of the mental lexicon, which is grounded in word andparadigm morphology, distributional semantics, error-driven learning, and uses insightsof psycholinguistic theories, and is implemented mathematically and computationallyas a shallow, two-layered network.In order to do this, we compiled a data set of 11528 verb forms and annotated for eachverb form its meaning and grammatical functions, and, additionally, we used our dataset to extract 573 verbs that are present in our full data set and for which meanings ofverbs are based on word embeddings. In order to assess comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs, we fed both data sets into the Linear Discriminative Learningalgorithm, a two-layered, fully connected network. One layer represent the phonological form and the layer represents meaning. Comprehension is modeled as a mapping from phonology to meaning and production is modeled as a mapping from meaning to phonology. Both comprehension and production is learned with high accuracy in all data and in held-out data, both for the full data set, with manually annotated semantic features, and for the data set with meanings derived from word embeddings.Our findings provide support for the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon:Words are stored as wholes, meanings are a result of the distribution of words in utterances, comprehension and production can be successfully modeled from mappings from form to meaning and vice versa, which can be modeled in a shallow two-layered network, and these mappings are learned in by minimizing errors.

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The Minimal Sign

Cited by 9 publications

References 29 publications

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning

Morpho-Phonetic Effects in Speech Production: Modeling the Acoustic Duration of English Derived Words With Linear Discriminative Learning

A Discriminative Lexicon Approach to Word Comprehension, Production and Processing: Maltese Plurals

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

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