Understanding typologies using Property Analysis: learnability, diachronic change, and formal structure

使用属性分析理解类型：可学习性、历时变化和形式结构

• 批准号: 1823827
• 负责人: Nazarre Merchant
• 金额: $ 17.35万
• 依托单位: Eckerd College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-09-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1823827&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Understanding; typologies; using; Property; Analysis

Languages change over time by accumulating small grammatical differences, and child language learners must be sensitive to these small differences. A robust theory of language change must then be able to articulate what are possible historical language changes and how these changes are transmitted intergenerationally. This project will address these issues by making concrete the notion of distance between languages and will determine how learners can utilize these small distinctions in learning. Dr. Merchant offers that there are parallels in the way that grammars change over time and learners navigate these changes to the way that RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences change over time and the corresponding phenotypes produced by these RNA sequences. Genetic notions of distance between phenotypes are directly applicable to notions of distances between languages, and these distances are directly relevant for explaining language change. In addition to providing a better understanding of how languages change and how learners acquire these changes, the project will create a large repository of analyzed languages allowing researchers to build on the insights gained in this project. Furthermore, the project will provide valuable STEM training for undergraduate students from underrepresented groups who will help to develop the online database. The technical core of the project involves developing and extending formal theories of language, language learning, and language change by incorporating ideas from genetics, topology, cognitive science, and linguistics. In particular, the project will accomplish these tasks by developing and expanding three interrelated components: (1) software tools will be developed that will allow linguists to calculate and compare formal theories of grammars, determine distances and adjacencies between languages, including distances arising from the genetic structure of grammars and those arising from the properties of the grammars (in the sense of Alber & Prince 2017), and evaluate the outcomes of learning algorithms that rely on different notions of grammatical distance. (2) An online repository of diachronically relevant analyzed linguistic systems will be created. (3) The learning algorithms using ideas of grammatical nearness will be applied to the analyzed systems of the repository to evaluate diachronically realistic and informative learning algorithms. This work will produce new models of language learning, diachronic change, and will contribute a significant body of publicly available data.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

随着时间的推移，语言会通过积累微小的语法差异而发生变化，儿童语言学习者必须对这些微小的差异敏感。一个强有力的语言变化理论必须能够阐明什么是可能的历史语言变化，以及这些变化是如何代际传递的。这个项目将通过使语言之间的距离概念具体化来解决这些问题，并将确定学习者如何在学习中利用这些细微的差异。Merchant博士提出，语法随时间变化的方式有相似之处，学习者将这些变化导航到RNA(核糖核酸)序列随时间变化的方式以及这些RNA序列产生的相应表型。表型间距离的遗传概念直接适用于语言间距离的概念，而这些距离与解释语言变化直接相关。除了更好地了解语言如何变化以及学习者如何获得这些变化外，该项目还将创建一个大型的分析语言存储库，使研究人员能够在此项目中获得的见解的基础上再接再厉。此外，该项目将为来自代表性不足群体的本科生提供宝贵的STEM培训，他们将帮助开发在线数据库。该项目的技术核心包括通过融合遗传学、拓扑学、认知科学和语言学的思想来开发和扩展语言、语言学习和语言变化的正式理论。特别是，该项目将通过开发和扩大三个相互关联的组成部分来完成这些任务：(1)将开发软件工具，使语言学家能够计算和比较正式的语法理论，确定语言之间的距离和邻接，包括由语法的遗传结构引起的距离和由语法的性质引起的距离(根据阿尔伯和普林斯2017年的意义)，并评估依赖不同语法距离概念的学习算法的结果。(2)将建立一个历时相关分析语言系统的在线资料库。(3)将使用语法贴近思想的学习算法应用于知识库的分析系统，以评估历时真实性和信息性的学习算法。这项工作将产生新的语言学习模式，历时变化，并将贡献大量可公开获得的数据。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。