This volume explores the universal mathematical properties underlying big language data and possible reasons why such properties exist, revealing how we may be unconsciously mathematical in our language use. These properties are statistical and thus different from linguistic universals that contribute to describing the variation of human languages, and they can only be identified over a large accumulation of usages. The book provides an overview of state-of-the art findings on these statistical universals and reconsiders the nature of language accordingly, with Zipf's law as a well-known example. The main focus of the book further lies in explaining the property of long memory, which was discovered and studied more recently by borrowing concepts from complex systems theory. The statistical universals not only possibly lie as the precursor of language system formation, but they also highlight the qualities of language that remain weak points in today's machine learning. In summary, this book provides an overview of language's global properties. It will be of interest to anyone engaged in fields related to language and computing or statistical analysis methods, with an emphasis on researchers and students in computational linguistics and natural language processing. While the book does apply mathematical concepts, all possible effort has been made to speak to a non-mathematical audience as well by communicating mathematical content intuitively, with concise examples taken from real texts.

Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences. During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.

A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2004 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Linguistik, Note: 2,8, Universit t zu K ln (Anglistisches Institut), Veranstaltung: Morphosyntax English - German, 5 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Language is something uniquely human. Bertrand Russell stated in 1948 that "A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor" (Whaley 1997: 4). Language ist not only unique to humans and diverse but there are also commonalities between languages. About five thousand languages are spoken in the world today but there still is a basic unity that undelies their diversities. Many of the world's languages show similar principles. An example of such a similaritiy is word order. In some languages such as English, French and Italian the word order is subject, verb and object. This is the so called SOV order. Besides similarities like this, there also exist features between some languages, which are common to all human languages in the world and are called language universals. These language universals classify entire languages into categories which are then based on shared properties. Language universals are examined within the field of typology. Typology has the task of examining cross-linguistic patterns. This means that "all typological research is based on comparisons between languages" (Whaley 1997: 7). Through comparing different languages with each other, one necessarily comes into contact with universals, which hold true for a group of languages or even for all languages. This is how language universals are placed within the field of typology.

This volume provides an up-to-date discussion of a foundational issue that has recently taken centre stage in linguistic typology and which is relevant to the language sciences more generally: To what extent can cross-linguistic generalizations, i.e. statistical universals of linguistic structure, be explained by the diachronic sources of these structures? Everyone agrees that typological distributions are the result of complex histories, as “languages evolve into the variation states to which synchronic universals pertain” (Hawkins 1988). However, an increasingly popular line of argumentation holds that many, perhaps most, typological regularities are long-term reflections of their diachronic sources, rather than being ‘target-driven’ by overarching functional-adaptive motivations. On this view, recurrent pathways of reanalysis and grammaticalization can lead to uniform synchronic results, obviating the need to postulate global forces like ambiguity avoidance, processing efficiency or iconicity, especially if there is no evidence for such motivations in the genesis of the respective constructions. On the other hand, the recent typological literature is equally ripe with talk of "complex adaptive systems", "attractor states" and "cross-linguistic convergence". One may wonder, therefore, how much room is left for traditional functional-adaptive forces and how exactly they influence the diachronic trajectories that shape universal distributions. The papers in the present volume are intended to provide an accessible introduction to this debate. Covering theoretical, methodological and empirical facets of the issue at hand, they represent current ways of thinking about the role of diachronic sources in explaining grammatical universals, articulated by seasoned and budding linguists alike.

This is an anthology of contemporary studies from various disciplinary perspectives written by some of the world's most renowned experts in each of the areas of mathematics, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, semiotics, education, and more. Its purpose is not to add merely to the accumulation of studies, but to show that math cognition is best approached from various disciplinary angles, with the goal of broadening the general understanding of mathematical cognition through the different theoretical threads that can be woven into an overall understanding. This volume will be of interest to mathematicians, cognitive scientists, educators of mathematics, philosophers of mathematics, semioticians, psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, and all other kinds of scholars who are interested in the nature, origin, and development of mathematical cognition.