Productivity and Reuse in Language : A Theory of Linguistic Computation and Storage

Abstract

Language allows us to express and comprehend an unbounded number of thoughts. This fundamental and much-celebrated property is made possible by a division of labour between a large inventory of stored items (e.g. affixes, words, idioms) and a computational system that productively combines these stored units on the fly to create a potentially unlimited array of new expressions. A language learner must discover a language's productive, reusable units and determine which computational processes can give rise to new expressions. But how does the learner differentiate between the reusable, generalizable units and apparent units that do not actually generalize in practice? In this book, Timothy O'Donnell proposes a formal computational model, 'Fragment Grammars', to answer these questions.