Author: Kyle Gorman

Defectivity in Amharic

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

According to Sande (2015), only Amharic verb stems that contain a geminate can form a frequentative. Since not all imperfect aspect verbs have geminates, some lack frequentatives and speakers must resort to periphrasis. If I understand the data correctly, it appears that the frequentative is a /Ca-/ reduplicant template which docks to the immediate left of the first geminate; the C (consonant) slot takes its value from said geminate. For instance, for the perfect verb [ˈsäb.bärä] ‘he broke’, the frequentative is [sä.ˈbab.bärä] ‘he broke repeatedly’. But there is no corresponding frequentative for the imperfective verb [ˈjə.säb(ə)r] ‘he breaks’ since there is no geminate to dock the reduplicant against; Sande marks as ungrammatical *[jə.sä.ˈbab(ə)r] and presumably other options are out too.

(h/t: Heather Newell)

References

Sande, H. 2015. Amharic infixing reduplication: support for a stratal approach to morphophonology. Talk presented at NELS 46.

Linguistics and prosociality

It is commonly said that linguistics as a discipline has enormous prosocial potential. What I actually suspect is that this potential is smaller than some linguists imagine. Linguistics is of course essential to the deep question of “what is human nature”, but we are up against our own epistemic bounds in answering these questions and the social impact of answering this question is not at all clear to me. Linguistics is also essential to the design of speech and language processing technologies (despite what you may have heard: don’t believe the hype), and while I find these technologies exciting, it remains to be seen whether they will be as societically transformative as investors think. And language documentation is transformative to some of society’s most marginalized. But I am generally skeptical of linguistics’ and linguists’ ability to combat societal biases more generally. While I don’t think any member of society should be considered well-educated until they’ve thought about the logical problems of language acquisition, considered the idea of language as something that exists in the mind rather than just in the ether, or confronted standard language ideologies, I have to question whether the broader discipline has been very effective here getting these messages out.

Online poisoning

One of my working theories for why natural language processing feels unusually contentious at present is, yes, social media. The outspoken researchers speak, more or less constantly, to a large social media audience, and use this forum as the primary way to form and disseminate opinions. For instance, there is a very strong correlation between being an “ACL thought leader”, if not an officer, and tweeting often and aggressively. People of my age understand the addictive and corrosive nature of presenting oneself for online kudos (and jeers), but some people of the older generations lack the appropriate internet literacy to use these tools in moderation, and some people of the younger generations lack the maturity to do the same. Such people have online poisoning. Side-effects include outing oneself as the subject of a subtweet and complaining to a student’s advisor. If you have any of these symptoms, please log off immediately and touch grass.

Defectivity in Turkish; part 2: desideratives

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

Thanks to correspondence with one of the authors I recently became aware of another possible paradigm gap in Turkish. According to İleri & Demirok (2022), henceforth ID, Turkish speakers are uncertain about the form of 3rd person plural desideratives. In this language, desideratives are deverbal nominals which select for and agree with a genitive subject. The desiderative suffix is /-AsI-/, where the capital letters mark archiphonemes subject to root harmony, and the 3rd person plural (3pl;.) possessive agreement suffix is /-lArI/. However, according to ID’s survey, Turkish speakers rate 3pl. desideratives formed from the root plus /-AsI-lArI/ as quite poor, and 3pl. desideratives are exceeding rare in corpora, even compared to other desiderative forms.

ID relate this observation to something unexpected about the 3rd person singular (3sg.) desiderative. Desideratives select, and agree with, a genitive subject, and the ordinary 3sg. genitive agreement suffix is /-sI/, but the 3sg. desiderative, there is apparently a haplology and we get just /-AsI/ (e.g., yapası, the 3sg. desiderative of ‘do’) instead of the expected */-AsI-sI/. They suggest that speakers may have reanalyzed /-AsI/ as a desiderative allomorph /-A/ followed by a 3sg. agreement suffix /-sI/, and thus predict that the 3pl. desiderative will be expressed by /-A-lArI/, though this is also judged to be quite bad (thus *yapasıları but also *yapaları). However, it is not immediately clear to me why ID expect speakers to hypothesize that the 3sg. desiderative allomorph should generalize to the 3pl.

This has a rather different flavor than the other defectivity case studies I’ve presented thus far. It could be that there simply are not enough desideratives in this person/number slot in the input, but I still don’t see what could be objectionable about /-AsI-lArI/. Another mystery is that their judgment task finds an unexplained very low acceptability for 2nd person plural desideratives (which seem to be of the form /-AsI-n/).

References

İleri, M. & Demirok, Ö. 2022. A paradigm gap in Turkish. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 7, pages 1-15.

It’s time to retire “agglutinative”

A common trope in computational linguistics papers is the use of the technical term agglutinative as a synonym for rich inflectional morphology. This is not really what that term means. Properly, a language has agglutinative morphology in the case that it has affixes, each of which has a single syntacto-semantic function. (To really measure this properly, you probably need a richer, and more syntactically-oriented, theory of morphology than is au courant among the kind of linguistic typologist who would think it interesting to measure this over a wide variety of languages in the first place, but that’s another issue.) Thus Russian, for instance, has rich inflectional morphology, but it is not at all agglutinative, because it is quite happy for the suffix -ov to mark both the genitive and the plural, whereas the genitive plural in Hungarian is marked by two affixes.

I propose that we take agglutinative away from NLP researchers until they learn even a little bit about morphology. If you want to use the term, you need to state why agglutination, rather than the mere matter of lexemes having a large number of inflectional variants, is the thing you want to highlight. While I don’t think WALS is very good —certainly it’s over-used in NLP—it nicely distinguishes between isolation (#20), exponence (#21), and synthesis (#22). This ought to allow one to distinguish between agglutination and synthesis with a carefully-drawn sample, should one wish to.

A prediction

You didn’t build that. – Barack Obama, July 13, 2012

Connectionism originates in psychology, but the “old connectionists” are mostly gone, having largely failed to pass on their ideology to their trainees, and there really aren’t many “young connectionists” to speak of. But, I predict that in the next few years we’ll see a bunch of psychologists of language—the ones who define themselves by their opposition to internalism, innateness, and generativism—become some of the biggest cheerleaders for large language models (LLMs). In fact, psychologists have not made substantial contributions to neural network modeling in many years. Virtually all the work on improving neural networks over the last few decades has been done by computer scientists who cared not a whit whether they had anything to do with human brains or cognitive plausibility.1 (Sometimes they’ll put things like “…inspired by the human brain…” in the press releases, but we all know that’s just fluff.) At this point, psychology as a discipline has no more claim to neural networks than the Irish do to Gaul, and in the rather unlikely case that LLMs do end up furnishing deep truths about cognition, psychology as a discipline will have failed us by not following up on a promising lead. I think it will be particularly revealing if psychologists who previously worshipped at the Church of Bayes suddenly lose all interest in mathematical rigor and find themselves praying to the great Black Box. I want to say it now: if this happens—and I am starting to see signs that it will—those people will be cynics, haters, and trolls, and you shouldn’t pay them any mind.

Endnotes

  1. I am also critical of machine learning pedagogy, and it is therefore interesting to see that those same computer scientists pushing things forward don’t seem to care much for machine learning as an academic discipline either.

Noam and Bill are friends

One of the more confusing slanders against generativism is the belief that it has all somehow been undone by William Labov and the tradition of variationist sociolinguistics. I have bad news: Noam and Bill are friends. I saw them chopping it up once, in Philadelphia, and I have to assume they were making fun of functionalists. Bill has nice things to say about the generativist program in his classic paper on negative concord; Noam has some interesting comments about how the acquirenda probably involve multiple competing grammars in that Piaget lecture book. They both think functionalism is wildly overrated. And of course, the i-language perspective that Noam brings is an absolute essential to dialogues about language ideologies, language change, stigma and stratification, and so forth that we associate with Bill.

More than one rule

[Leaving this as a note to myself to circle back.]

I’m just going to say it: some “rules” are probably two or three rules, because the idea that rules are defined by natural classes (and thus free of disjunctions) is more entrenched than our intuitions about whether or not a process in some language is really one rule or not, and we should be Gallilean about this. Here are some phonological “rules” that are probably two or three rules different rules.

  • Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic families, and Albanian “ruki” (environment: preceding {w, j, k, r}): it is not clear to me if any of these languages actually need this as a synchronic rule at all.
  • Breton voiced stop lenition (change: /b/ to [v], /d/ to [z], /g/ to [x]): the devoicing of /g/ must be a separate rule. Hat tip: Richard Sproat. I believe there’s a parallel set of processes in German.
  • Lamba patalatalization (change: /k/ to [tʃ], /s/ to [ʃ]): two rules, possibly with a Duke-of-York thing. Hat tip: Charles Reiss.
  • Mid-Atlantic (e.g., Philadelphia) English ae-tensing (environment: following tautosyllabic, same-stem {m, n, f, θ, s, ʃ]): let’s assume this is allophony; then the anterior nasal and voiceless fricative cases should be separate rules. It is possible the incipient restructuring of this as having a simple [+nasal] context provides evidence for the multi-rule analysis.
  • Latin glide formation (environment: complex). Front and back glides are formed from high short monophthongs in different but partially overlapping contexts.

Industry postdocs

I find the very idea of industry postdocs funny (funny-sad, though). Sure, it makes sense for the academy, with all of its scarcities, to make use of precarious, casualized post-graduate labor, but to extend this to the tech sector is vaguely monstrous. It’s extra funny (but funny-sad too) when you hear of a senior professor doing an industry postdoc at a company with a name like baz.ly during their sabbatical.