Abstract for Charles Yang's talk

Finding Nuts
Charles Yang (Yale University)
September 13, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Language learning is a remarkably robust process. The child is exceptionally good at recognizing systematic regularities even when faced with lexically and contextually restricted exceptions '- or "nuts", to use Peter Culicover's colorful term. How do they do it?

This talk sketches out a preliminary model that recognizes productive processes and nuts as such; accordingly, the learner can proceed to internalize each as different kinds of linguistic knowledge. We argue that if a linguistic process is conjectured to be productive, then having exceptions to it can add (surprisingly) significant cost to its online processing. Empirically, we explore these issues in the domain of morphology, which leads to finer-grained analyses of a number of well-known morphological problems. The methodology and results of this work may generalize to syntactic learning.