Discovery Procedure

Catalog description

The fundamental goal of linguistics is to provide a discovery procedure for language, a practical and mechanical method for constructing a grammar given a corpus of utterances. This was deemed a premature endeavor at the beginning of modern linguistics. Indeed, at that time there were no linguistic corpora, no modern theory of computation and learning, and no understanding of what properties languages have or how children learn them. Several decades of advances in linguistics, psychology, and computer science have made it possible to develop a concrete theory of discovery procedure. In this class we will survey mechanistic accounts of learning and their applications to language acquisition, with the aim of providing a formal and distributional account of all structural aspects of language from phonemes and upward. Such an approach in turn raises important questions about the scope and limit of language and its place in cognition.