Author: Kyle Gorman

On alternative frameworks

[continuing an argument from earlier…]

I think that intellectual diversity and academic freedom are good baseline values, but that they are not so obviously a positive value in pedagogy. Students genuinely look to their instructors for information about approaches to pursue, and not all frameworks (etc.) are of equal value. Let us suppose that I subscribe to theory P and you to theory Q (≠ P). Necessarily one of the following must be true:

(1) P and Q are mere notational variants (i.e., weakly equivalent or better).
(2) P is “more right” than Q or Q is “more right” than P.

In the case of (1), the best pedagogical practice would probably be to continue to propagate whichever of {P, Q} is more widely used, more intellectually robust, etc. For instance if Q is the more robust tradition, efforts to “port” insights and technologies from Q to P contribute little, and often quite difficult in practice. Of course this doesn’t mean that P and its practitioners should be suppressed or anything of the sort, but there is no strong imperative to transmit P to young scholars.

In the case of (2), the best practice is also to focus pedagogy on whichever of the two is “more right”. Of course it is often useful to teach the intellectual history, and it is not always clear which theory is out ahead, but it is imperative to make sure students are conversant in the most promising approaches.

In the case of computational syntactic formalisms, weak equivalences hold between minimalist grammars (MGs) as formalized by Stabler and colleagues) and most of the so-called alternative formalisms. It is also quite clear to me that insights largely flow from minimalism and friends (broadly construed) to the alternative formalisms, and not the other way around. Finally, efforts to “port” these insights to alternative formalisms have stalled, or perhaps are just many years behind the bleeding edge in syntactic theory. (1) therefore applies, and I simply don’t see the strong imperative to teach the alternative formalisms.

In the case of computational phonology, there is also an emerging consensus that harmonic grammar (HG) of the sort learned by “maxent” technologies) have substantial pathologies compared to earlier formalisms, so that classic Optimality Theory (OT) is clearly “less wrong”. I am similarly sympathetic to arguments that global evaluation frameworks including HG and OT are overly constrained with respect to opacity phenomena and overgenerate in other dimensions, and these issues of expressivity are not shared with imperative (i.e., rule-based) and declarative (i.e., “weakly deterministic” formalisms of the “Delaware school”). (2) thus applies here.

Of course I am not advocating for restrictions on academic freedom or speech in general; I make this argument only regarding best pedagogical practices, and I’m not sure I’m in the right here.

Trust me, I’m a linguist

Grice’s maxim of quantity requires that one give no more information than is strictly required. This is somestimes misunderstood as a firm constraint, but one intuition you may have—and which is nicely expressed by rational speech act theory—is that apparent violations of this maxim by an otherwise cooperative speaker may actually tell you that seemingly-irrelevant information is, in the mind of the speaker, of great relevance to the discourse.

I recently read two interviews in which the subject—crucially, not a working linguist—drew attention to their linguistics education.

The first is this excellent profile of Joss Sackler, a woman who married into the Sackler opioid fortune. To be fair, she does hold a PhD in Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian literatures & languages (dissertation here), which ought to qualify one, but her response to the Town & Country reporter asking some bad press is exactly the kind of non-sequitur a rational speaker ought not to make: “They’re going to regret fucking with a linguist. They already do.”

The second comes from interviews with Nicole Daedone, the co-founder of an organization (it’s hard to describe, just read about it if you’re interested) called OneTaste. I’ve now read several profiles of her (the first was in the New York Times, I think, years ago, but I can’t find it anymore), and in each they mention that she studied linguistics in San  Francisco; one source says she has a bachelor’s degree in “gender communications and semantics” from San Francisco State University, another says she was at some point working on a linguistics PhD there. The relevance was again unclear to me, but later I read the very interesting book Future Sex, which also profiles her. There, there is a brief discussion of the lexical semantics of pussy; Daedone, who is (it’s complicated) a sex educator, proposes that it fills a lexical lacuna, by providing a single term that refers to the human vulva and vagina as a whole.

This all makes me wonder whether to the general public, linguistics really connotes brilliance, and, perhaps, tenacity. And it makes me wonder whether one could actually wield their linguistics education as a shield against criticisms having nothing to do with language per se.

ACL Rolling Reviews don’t roll anymore

Recently I wanted to submit a paper to the ACL’s rolling reviews system. The idea of this system is that instead of people rushing to make somewhat arbitrary conference deadlines—most everything is published at conferences rather than books or journals in NLP—one can instead submit to an ever-running pool of reviewers and get quick comments. Furthermore, the preprints are available online and one can see the comments. After you the author feel that you’ve received a satisfactory review you can then “submit”, with the push of a button, your already-reviewed paper to a conference and the organizers and area chairs put together a program from these papers. This seems like a good idea thus far, even if the very strong COI policy means that none of the papers I get assigned to review are interesting to me but rather in adjacent (and boring) areas.

I was recently surprised to find—it’s not documented anywhere, I had to write tech support and wait to hear back—that it there are now blackout periods of several weeks where one cannot submit. I have no idea why this is true. Granted, they reduced the frequency of the cycles to six a year (or one every two months), but I don’t understand why I can’t, on July 1st, submit to the August 15th cycle. This makes no sense to me and seems to defeat the most important part of this initiative: the idea that you can submit work when it’s done rather than when certain stars align.

Myths about writing systems

In collaboration with Richard Sproat, I just published a short position paper on “myths about writing systems” in NLP to appear in the proceedings for CAWL, the ACL Workshop on Computation and Writing Systems. I think it will be most of all useful to reviewers and editors who need a resource to combat nonsense like Persian is a right-to-left language and want to suggest a correction. Take a look here.

Defectivity in Scottish Gaelic

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies. Hat tip to John Hutchinson for this valuable information.]

I am currently wrapping up a class at the LSA Institute class on defectivity, and as part of this class students presented case studies. Some of them students enriched case studies I have already presented in this defectivity blog series; the following new-to-me case was provided to us by John Hutchinson of the University of Surrey.

Defective verbs in Gaelic have been long noted, particularly by Dwelly (1911) and Maclaren (1935). They are something of a grab-bag. First, there are verbs with tense restrictions:

  • The verb of quotation ars/orsa ‘said’ is restricted to past tense only.
  • Where English has the adverb almost, Gaelic has theab, which selects a verb-noun complement (e.g., theab e fhéin a bhith marbh ‘he was almost dead’) and which is also restricted to past tense.
  • The verb faod ‘may’ is non-past only.
  • The verb feum ‘must’ is non-past only, though Hutchinson notes that past forms do occur in corpora.

There are also a number of verbs which occur only in the imperative (cf. my judgments about English beware):

  • trothad/trobhad ‘come here’
  • t(h)iugainn ‘come along’
  • thalla ‘go away’
  • siuthad ‘go on, fire away’
  • feuch ‘behold’ (though note this is not defective in the sense of ‘show’)

Finally, Hutchinson notes that prepositions are inflected for person and number but eadar ‘between’ (naturally enough) only has plural forms. These cases of defectivity make a lot of semantic sense to me, particularly the restriction on the modal-like verbs and on ‘between’.

References

Dwelly, E. 1911. Illustrated Gaelic English Dictionary. Alex Maclaren & Sons.
Maclaren, J. 1935. Maclaren’s Gaelic Self-Taught, 4th edition. Alex Maclaren & Sons.

Defectivity in French

[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Morin (1987:33f.), cited in Boyé & Cabredo Hofherr (2010), draws attention to the French verb frire ‘to fry’. It is unobjectionable in the present active singular—je fris, tu fris, il frit—but apparently defective in the plural; according to my informants, speakers paraphrase this using inflected forms of faire frire ‘to make fried’. Arrivé (1987), also cited by Boyé & Cabredo Hofherr, lists frire and about a dozen other verbs as defective; according to my informants, all are rare, archaic, or unfamiliar.

Consider the case of frire briefly. It has an obvious analogical model: rire ‘to laugh’, which suggests *nous frions ‘we fry’, and so on. One obvious possibility is that this is somehow in competition with *nous frissons (cf. je finis/nous finissons ‘I/we finish’ and most 2nd conjugation verbs), which would give rise to a weird homophony with the plural of frisson ‘shiver; excitement’.1

Endnotes

  1. Here the ss appearing in the plural is ultimately descended from the Latin inchoative infix -sc- as seen in, e.g., nascō ‘I am born’. Neat, right?

References

Arrivé, M. 1997. La conjugaison pour tous. Hatier.
Boyé, G., and Cabredo Hofherr, P. 2010. Defectivity as stem suppletion in French and Spanish verbs. In Defective Paradigms: Missing Forms and What They Tell Us, ed. M. Baerman, G. G. Corbett, and D. Brown, 35–52. Oxford University Press.
Morin, Y.-C. 1987. Remarques sur l’organisation de la flexion des verbes français. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics 77-78: 13-91.

“Hi both”

I recently noticed that I have been receiving emails, addressed to multiple recipients, with the salutation

Hi both,

In fact I appear to have 34 of them in one of my many inboxes, including two received from different authors today. For me, this is sharply ungrammatical, though I am not sure why. Both is unobjectionable in subject or object position (e.g.,  Both liked limoncello, She fancies both, etc.) so I am not sure why it is bad in a salutation. A very informal survey of the people who have sent it to me shows two speakers for whom English is their second language (though both have extremely high proficiency) but also several native speakers too. Any ideas?

Debugging CUDA indexing errors

Perhaps you’ve seen pages of the following scary error:

../aten/src/ATen/native/cuda/IndexKernel.cu:92: operator(): block: [99,0,0], thread: [115,0,0] Assertion `index >= -sizes[i] && index < sizes[i] && "index out of bounds"` failed.

It turns out there is a relatively simple way to figure out what the indexing issue is. The internet suggests prepending

CUDA_LAUNCH_BLOCKING=1

to your command, but this doesn’t seem to help much either. There is a simpler solution: run whatever you’re doing on CPU. It’ll give you much nicer errors.

A note on pure allophony

I have previously discussed the notion of pure allophony, contrasting it with the facts of alternations. What follows is a lightly edited section from my recent NAPhC 12 talk, which in part hinges on this notion.

While Halle (1959) famously dispenses with the structuralist distinction between phonemics and morphophonemics, some later generativists reject pure allophony outright. Let the phonemic inventory of some grammar G be P and the set of surface phones generated by G from P be S. If some phoneme p ∈ P always corresponds—in some to be made precise—to some phone s ∈ S and if s ∉ P then s is a pure allophone of p. For example, if /s/ is a phoneme and [ʃ] is not, but all [ʃ]s correspond to /s/s, then [ʃ] is a pure allophone of [s]. According to some descriptions, this is the case for Korean, as [ʃ] is a (pure) allophone of /s/ when followed by [i].

One might argue that alternations are more entrenched facts than pure allophony, simply because it is always possible to construct a grammar free of pure allophony. For instance, if one wants to do away with pure allophony one can derive the Korean word [ʃI] ‘poem’ from /ʃi/ rather than from /si/. One early attempt to rule out pure allophony—and thus to motivate the choice of /ʃi/ over /si/ for the this problem—is the alternation condition (Kiparsky 1968). As Kenstowicz & Kisseberth (1979:215) state it, this condition holds that “the UR of a morpheme may not contain a phoneme /x/ that is always realized phonetically as identical to the realization of some other phoneme /y/.” [Note here that /x, y/ are to be interpreted as variables rather than as the voiceless velar fricative or the front high round vowel.–KBG] Another recent version of this idea—often attributed to Dell (1973) or Stampe (1973)—is the notion of lexicon optimization (Prince & Smolensky 1993:192).

A correspondent to this list wonders why, in a grammar G such that G(a) = G(b) for potential input elements /a, b/, a nonalternating observed element [a] is not (sometimes, always, freely) lexically /b/. The correct answer is surely “why bother?”—i.e. to set up /b/ for [a] when /a/ will do […] The basic idea reappears as “lexicon optimization” in recent discussions. (Alan Prince, electronic discussion; cited in Hale & Reiss 2008:246)

Should grammars with pure allophony be permitted? The question is not, as is sometimes supposed, a purely philosophical one (see Hale & Reiss 2008:16-22): both linguists and infants acquiring language require a satisfactory answer. In my opinion, the burden of proof lies with those who would deny pure allophony. They must explain how the language acquisition device (LAD) either directly induces grammars that satisfy the alternation condition, or optimizes all pure allophony out of them after the fact. “Why bother” could go either way: why posit either complication to the LAD when pure allophony will do? The linguist faces a similar problem to the infant. To wit, I began this project assuming Latin glide formation was purely allophonic, and only later uncovered—subtle and rare—evidence for vowel-glide alternations. Thus in this study, I make no apology for—and draw no further attention to—the fact that some data are purely allophonic. This important question will have to be settled by other means.

References

Dell, F. 1973. Les règles et les sons. Hermann.
Hale, M, and Reiss, R.. 2008. The Phonological Enterprise. Oxford University Press.
Halle, M. 1959. The Sound Pattern of Russian. Mouton.
Kenstowicz, M. and Kisseberth, C. 1979. Generative Phonology: Description and Theory. Academic Press.
Kiparsky. P. 1968. How Abstract is Phonology? Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Prince, A. and Smolensky, P. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Technical Report TR-2, Rutgers University Center For Cognitive Science and Technical Report CU-CS-533-91, University of Colorado, Boulder Department of Computer Science.
Stampe, D. 1973. A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. Garland.