Approaching explanatory adequacy in phonology using Minimum Description Length

A linguistic theory reaches explanatory adequacy if it arrives at a linguistically-appropriate grammar based on the kind of input available to children. In phonology, we assume that children can succeed even when the input consists of surface evidence alone, with no corrections or explicit paradigmatic information – that is, in learning from distributional evidence. We take the grammar to include both a lexicon of underlying representations and a mapping from the lexicon to surface forms. Moreover, this mapping should be able to express optionality and opacity, among other textbook patterns. This learning challenge has not yet been addressed in the literature. We argue that the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL) offers the right kind of guidance to the learner – favoring generalizations that are neither overly general nor overly specific – and can help the learner overcome the learning challenge. We illustrate with an implemented MDL learner that succeeds in learning various linguistically-relevant patterns from small corpora.

Vulnerability, Space, Communication: Three Conditions of Adequacy for Cosmopolitan Right

The chapter argues that according to the Kantian completeness assumption, not only do we face a major unresolved systematic issue—all exercise of cosmopolitan right takes place in a state of nature between states and foreigners: a highly structured state of nature, to be sure, but a state of nature nonetheless—but we have too few options for fulfilling the conditions of explanatory adequacy. Niesen points out that in Kant and the Law of War no space is reserved for leaving normative issues undecided, to be resolved through politics and through additional, positive global institutions.

Theory Construction Methodology: A Practical Framework for Building Theories in Psychology

This article aims to improve theory formation in psychology by developing a practical methodology for constructing explanatory theories: theory construction methodology (TCM). TCM is a sequence of five steps. First, the theorist identifies a domain of empirical phenomena that becomes the target of explanation. Second, the theorist constructs a prototheory, a set of theoretical principles that putatively explain these phenomena. Third, the prototheory is used to construct a formal model, a set of model equations that encode explanatory principles. Fourth, the theorist investigates the explanatory adequacy of the model by formalizing its empirical phenomena and assessing whether it indeed reproduces these phenomena. Fifth, the theorist studies the overall adequacy of the theory by evaluating whether the identified phenomena are indeed reproduced faithfully and whether the explanatory principles are sufficiently parsimonious and substantively plausible. We explain TCM with an example taken from research on intelligence (the mutualism model of intelligence), in which key elements of the method have been successfully implemented. We discuss the place of TCM in the larger scheme of scientific research and propose an outline for a university curriculum that can systematically educate psychologists in the process of theory formation.

How usage-based approaches to language can contribute to a unified theory of heritage grammars

In this paper, we argue that usage-based approaches to grammar, which specify how linguistic experience leads to grammatical knowledge through the interplay of cognitive, linguistic and social factors, have a central role to play in contributing to a unified theory of heritage language acquisition and processing with much greater explanatory adequacy. We discuss how this approach (1) offers solutions to long- standing problems in the field of heritage language research, (2) links phenomena that have been explained under diverging theoretical perspectives and (3) leads to new hypotheses and testable predictions about what we can expect heritage speakers acquire from their input. We conclude that usage-based approaches are crucial to move away from deficit-oriented perspectives on heritage grammars by taking into consideration how variation in sociolinguistic experience gives rise to differences in how heritage speakers acquire and use their language.

Chomsky and Intentionality

Intentionality, or the property of minds and representations whereby they are “about” things real or unreal, such as chairs, ghosts, colors, or words. Although intentionality seems to play a crucial role in psychology and in Chomskyan linguistics, its reality has been contested by philosophers such as Quine and, surprisingly, by Chomsky himself. On behalf of Chomsky, John Collins has defended a “Scientific Eliminativism,” endorsing what I call a “Platonist-algebraic” reading of Chomsky’s core theory. I argue that this reading will fall short of satisfying “explanatory adequacy,” failing to provide an account of how a child could be perceptually sensitive to linguistic phenomena. As argued in Chapter 7, this latter requires intentionalist representations, even of phenomena such as words (and colors) that do not exist, what Brentano called “intentional inexistents,” a category this chapter argues is not as problematic as naturalistic philosophers have feared.

/dˤ/-Variation in Saudi Newscasting and Phonological Theory

In his analysis of /dˤ/-variation in Saudi Arabian newscasting, Al-Tamimi (2020) finds unpredicatble variability between the standard variant [dˤ] and the non-standard variant [ðˤ] in different in-words positions, in different phonetic environments, and in semantically ‘content’ and suprasegmentally ‘stressed’ lexical itmes assumed to favor the standard variant. He even finds in many of these lexical items an unusual realizational flucatuation between the two variants. The present exploratory and ‘theory-testing’ study aims to find a reasonable account for these findings through examining the explanatory adequacy of a number of available phonological theories, notions, models and proposals that have made different attempts to accommodate variation, and this includes Coexistent Phonemic Systems, Standard Generative Phonology, Lexical Diffusion, Variable Rules, Poly-Lectal Grammar, Articulatory Phonology, different versions of the Optimality Theory, in addition to the Multiple-Trace-Model, as represented by Al-Tamimi’s (2005) Multiple-Trace-Based Proposal. The study reveals the strengths and weaknesses of these theories in embracing the variability in the data, and concludes that the Multiple-Trace-Based Proposal can relatively offer the best insight as its allows variation to be directly encoded in the underlying representations of lexical items, a status strictly prohibited by the rest of the theories that adopt invariant lexical representations in consonance with the ‘Homogeneity Doctrine’.

Theory Construction Methodology: A practical framework for theory formation in psychology

This paper aims to improve theory formation in psychology by developing a practical methodology for constructing explanatory theories: Theory Construction Methodology (TCM). TCM is a sequence of five steps. First, the theorist identifies empirical phenomena to become the target of explanation. Second, the theorist constructs a proto-theory: a set of theoretical principles that potentially explain these phenomena. Third, the proto-theory is used to construct a formal model: a set of model equations or simulation models that encode the explanatory principles. Fourth, the theorist investigates this model’s explanatory adequacy. This is done by formalizing the empirical phenomena in terms of the model, and assessing whether the model indeed reproduces them. Fifth, the theorist studies the overall adequacy of the theory by evaluating whether phenomena are indeed reproduced faithfully, whether explanatory principles are parsimonious and substantively plausible, and whether the theory implies new predictions to promote further research. We illustrate TCM with an example taken from the intelligence literature (the mutualism model of intelligence), discuss the place of TCM in the larger scheme of scientific research, and propose an outline for a university curriculum that can systematically educate psychologists in the process of theory formation.

Comitative P

This chapter investigates the diachronic development of the Italian comitative preposition con “with” and its pronominal complement. The authors verify the predictions of the Directional Asymmetry Principle, an independently motivated developmental universal, in the diachrony of Italian and argue that symmetry breaking reduces the choice between a valued and an unvalued variant of a functional feature associated with a functional head, here comitative P. As predicted by the hypothesis, this choice, which was available in earlier stages of Italian, is gradually reduced in Modern Italian. The authors relate variation in language to variation in evolutionary developmental biology. Because language variation is biologically grounded, and variation is a central concept in biology, a deeper understanding of linguistic diversity can be foreseen, that is, an understanding that goes beyond explanatory adequacy.

A Study of the Development of Generative Grammar from the Perspective of Changes in the Movement Pattern

Movement plays an important role in generative grammar. This paper expounds characteristics and motivation of the development of generative grammar theory by analyzing and contrasting the movement pattern in different periods of generative grammar. From Move-∝ to the feature checking, and then to the matching of the probe and the target under agreement feature, a series of changes in movement pattern indicate that generative grammar is exploring the principled interpretation of the language from the perspective of biolinguistics, the explanation of the characteristics and general principles of the interface system, ultimately to the goal of going beyond the explanatory adequacy.