An official website of the United States government
Even though languages can express a wide range of quantifiers, only a small number are ever realized as morphologically simplex determiners: every, no, some, and most. This is puzzling because I) most is much more complex than the other three, and II) quantifiers like an even number are simpler than most yet cannot belong to this class. Building on concepts from subregular complexity, I present a new way of measuring a quantifier’s complexity in terms of its verification pattern. The quantifiers every, no, some, and most all have strictly 2-local (SL-2) verification patterns, but quantifiers like an even number do not. This suggests that subregular complexity, and in particular strict locality, plays a crucial role for how much meaning can be packed into morphologically simplex expressions.
more »
« less
A Subregular Bound on the Complexity of Lexical Quantifiers
Semantic automata were developed to compare the complexity of generalized quantifiers in terms of the string languages that describe their truth conditions. An important point that has gone unnoticed so far is that these string languages are remarkably simple for most quantifiers, in particular those that can be realized by a single lexical item. Whereas complex quantifiers such as "an even number of" correspond to specific regular languages, the lexical quantifiers "every", "no", "some", as well as numerals do not reach this level of complexity. Instead, they all stay close to the bottom of the so-called subregular hierarchy. What more, the class of tier-based strictly local languages provide a remarkably tight characterization of the class of lexical quantifiers. A significant number of recent publications have also argued for the central role of tier-based strict locality in phonology, morphology, and syntax. This suggests that subregularity in general and tier-based strict locality in particular may be a unifying property of natural language across all its submodules.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1845344
- PAR ID:
- 10140840
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 455-464
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Extending prior work in Graf (2018, 2020, 2022c), I show that movement is tier-based strictly local (TSL) even if one analyzes it as a transformation, i.e. a tree transduction from derivation trees to output trees. I define input strictly local (ISL) tree-to-tree transductions with (lexical) TSL tests as a tier-based extension of ISL tree-to-tree transductions. TSL tests allow us to attach each mover to all its landing sites. In general, this class of transductions fails to attach each mover to its final landing site to the exclusion of all its intermediate landing sites, which is crucial for producing output trees with the correct string yield. The problem is avoided, though, if syntax enforces a variant of the Ban on Improper Movement. Subregular complexity thus provides a novel motivation for core restrictions on movement while also shedding new light on the choice between copies and traces in syntax.more » « less
-
The subregular approach has revealed that the phonological surface patterns found in natural language are much simpler than previously assumed. Most patterns belong to the subregular class of tier-based strictly local languages (TSL), which characterizes them as the combination of a strictly local dependency with a tier-projection mechanism that masks out irrelevant segments. Some non-TSL patterns have been pointed out in the literature, though. We show that these outliers can be captured by rendering the tier projection mechanism sensitive to the surrounding structure. We focus on a specific instance of these structure-sensitive TSL languages: input-local TSL (ITSL), in which the tier projection may distinguish between identical segments that occur in different local contexts in the input string. This generalization of TSL establishes a tight link between tier-based language classes and ISL transductions, and is motivated by several natural language phenomena.more » « less
-
MLRegTest is a benchmark for machine learning systems on sequence classification, which contains training, development, and test sets from 1,800 regular languages. MLRegTest organizes its languages according to their logical complexity (monadic second order, first order, propositional, or monomial expressions) and the kind of logical literals (string, tier-string, subsequence, or combinations thereof). The logical complexity and choice of literal provides a systematic way to understand different kinds of long-distance dependencies in regular languages, and therefore to understand the capacities of different ML systems to learn such long-distance dependencies.more » « less
-
We examine the role of referential properties and lexical stipulation in three closely related languages of eastern Indonesia, the Alor-Pantar languages Abui, Kamang, and Teiwa. Our focus is on the continuum along which event properties (e.g. volitionality, affectedness) are highly important at one extreme or play virtually no role at the other. These languages occupy different points along this continuum. In Abui, event semantics play the greatest role, while in Teiwa they play the smallest role (the lexical property animacy being dominant in the formation of verb classes). Kamang occupies an intermediate position. Teiwa has conventionalised the relation between a verb and its class along the lines of animacy so that classes become associated with the animacy value of the objects with which the verbs in a given class typically occur. Paying attention to a lexical property like animacy, in contrast with event properties, has meant greater potential for arbitrary classes to emerge.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
