Big questions Survey of areas of linguistics Summary The lab Linguistics in a nutshell by hook or by crook Jeremy G. Kahn Signal, Speech & Language Interpretation Laboratory Department of Linguistics University of Washington 22 June 2008 / Workshop 2007 Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Survey of areas of linguistics Summary The lab Outline Linguistics: big questions 1 Linguistics charter What linguists look at Linguistics’ role Survey of areas of linguistics 2 Phonetics & Phonology Morphology and syntax Semantics The lab 3 Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Survey of areas of linguistics Summary The lab Business information Linguistics introductions By necessity, incomplete Apologies my personal speaking style guessing about level of preparation Caveat: I’m a computational linguist Caveat: I have an engineering bias Goal: informality. Questions are good Thanks to Don Baumer (Linguistics) for letting me crib slides & examples Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Outline Linguistics: big questions 1 Linguistics charter What linguists look at Linguistics’ role Survey of areas of linguistics 2 Phonetics & Phonology Morphology and syntax Semantics The lab 3 Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab What is linguistics? Scientific study of human language How is language organized? How is it used? General questions about Language (capital L) What do all languages have in common? How can we describe how Language (or languages) works? How can we describe how a language works? Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Language & communication All communications have: mode or medium : speech, gesture, olfaction, etc semanticity : meaning carried pragmatic function : intention carried some also have: interchangeability (send *and* receive) cultural transmission : learned from other users arbitrariness : non-iconicity discreteness "compositionality" displacement : discuss things that aren’t here productivity : new ways to organize it Where do computer languages differ from human languages? Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab What makes language interesting? Language is creative, but constrained “Seattle is rainy.” – well-formed * “rainy Seattle is.” – ill-formed “I like caffeinated drinks without bubbles.” * “Bubbles without drinks caffeinated like I” Not just word order: “pronk” could be an English word (in fact, it is) “przak” could not be (how do you know?) Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Constraint and creativity Linguists like to say language is “rule-governed”. Statistically-minded engineers might quibble... Engineering way of looking at it (thanks Shannon): sender wants to have symbol for every idea recipient won’t have those symbols compositionality and productivity allows novelty and communication Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Outline Linguistics: big questions 1 Linguistics charter What linguists look at Linguistics’ role Survey of areas of linguistics 2 Phonetics & Phonology Morphology and syntax Semantics The lab 3 Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Language as a part of the human OS Language: not literacy. major advantage over chimpanzees (e.g. displacement) we’ve got specialist wetware Competent language use No school required No explicit instruction required Most humans competent in one language before age 3 What do we mean when we say “competent”? Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Competence and Performance Big idea in modern linguistics Competence : what a native user of a language knows. ability to produce & comprehend language system or knowledge (“grammar”) that supports that largely subconscious learned (first-language) without effort Performance : what language users do often fully competent not always: speech errors, typos, “brain-o’s” Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab What’s so neat about competence? Many modern linguists care about competence more than performance. Their view (Chomsky): your competence is a window on the underlying structure of your grammar your performance includes a bunch of messy wetware These (self-proclaimed “theoretical”) linguists are very very interested in trying to figure out what the OS is from the behavior of the code. Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Grammaticality and meaningfulness “Meaningful” and “grammatical” not synonymous: Grammatical, but meaningless : ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.’ — Noam Chomsky Ungrammatical, but meaningful : ‘Around the survivors, a perimeter create.’ — Yoda, Episode 2 Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Outline Linguistics: big questions 1 Linguistics charter What linguists look at Linguistics’ role Survey of areas of linguistics 2 Phonetics & Phonology Morphology and syntax Semantics The lab 3 Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab What’s all this about grammar, then? Descriptive grammar : an attempt to describe the acceptability judgments (or patterns of use/competence) of a speaker. Prescriptive grammar : explicit instructions on how one should write (or speak); the language police. Linguistics is not about descriptive grammar. We don’t tell you how you should . We try to describe how you do . Dogma: All human languages, stigmatized or not, are equally expressive. Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Linguistics and semi-supervised learning Humans do it We get very little explicit labeling of our language data, yet we learn without instruction: what words and parts of words mean how to pronounce words we read how to understand sophisticated sentence constructions (“respectively”) and more. . . It’s not all hard-coded (“universal grammar”): patterns often language-specific Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Charter Survey of areas of linguistics What linguists look at Summary Linguistics’ role The lab Linguistics and semi-supervised learning The corpora are out there : the web email (Enron emails!) newsgroups also speech corpora: radio television podcasts All mostly unlabeled but enormous Natural language problems: perfect for semi-supervised work. Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Phonetics & Phonology Survey of areas of linguistics Morphology and syntax Summary Semantics The lab Overview of the different parts of language Overview of the different parts of language (different parts of "grammar") Phonetics - how sounds are made and perceived Phonology - function and patterning of sounds Morphology - structure of words Syntax - analysis of sentence structure (word order) Semantics - meaning (words to meaning) Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Phonetics & Phonology Survey of areas of linguistics Morphology and syntax Summary Semantics The lab Other areas of linguistic study Other areas of linguistic study: Historical linguistics - language evolution and creation Pragmatics - what else is intended and performed Typology - language classification and differences Psycholinguistics - neurobiological basis for language Language acquisition Sociolinguistics - language’s influence on and indication of social status and behavior Writing systems - . . . a mess and more. . . We’ll not cover those here Kahn Linguistics brushup
Big questions Phonetics & Phonology Survey of areas of linguistics Morphology and syntax Summary Semantics The lab Outline Linguistics: big questions 1 Linguistics charter What linguists look at Linguistics’ role Survey of areas of linguistics 2 Phonetics & Phonology Morphology and syntax Semantics The lab 3 Kahn Linguistics brushup
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