Home Linguistics & Semiotics It’s time for a complete theory of partial predictability in language
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

It’s time for a complete theory of partial predictability in language

  • Louise McNally EMAIL logo , Olivier Bonami and Denis Paperno
Published/Copyright: July 4, 2024
Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Abstract

Given the centrality of partial predictability to linguistic experience, it plays a strikingly minor role in theoretical linguistics. For many, partial predictability is to be set aside: the job of linguistic theory is to explain the infinite generative capacity of language and the semantic compositionality that accompanies it. For others, partial predictability is evidence that such an approach is missing the point. But surprisingly little attention is devoted to understanding how partial predictability actually works. We argue that linguistic theory should recognize partial predictability as a central design feature of human language, and propose a strategy for doing so.


Corresponding author: Louise McNally, U. Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, E-mail:

Anderson, Stephen R. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511586262Search in Google Scholar

Apidianaki, Marianna. 2023. From word types to tokens and back: A survey of approaches to word meaning representation and interpretation. Computational Linguistics 49. 465–523.10.1162/coli_a_00474Search in Google Scholar

Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bauer, Laurie. 1997. Derivational paradigms. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1996, 243–256. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-017-3718-0_13Search in Google Scholar

Bauer, Laurie. 2019. Notions of paradigm and their value in word-formation. Word Structure 12. 153–175. https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2019.0144.Search in Google Scholar

Blevins, James P. 2001. Paradigmatic derivation. Transactions of the Philological Society 99. 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968x.00080.Search in Google Scholar

Blevins, James P. 2016. Word and paradigm morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199593545.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Search in Google Scholar

Bochner, Harry. 1993. Simplicity in generative morphology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110889307Search in Google Scholar

Bojanowski, Piotr, Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin & Tomas Mikolov. 2017. Enriching word vectors with subword information. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 5. 135–146. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00051.Search in Google Scholar

Bonami, Olivier & Matías Guzmán Naranjo. 2023. Distributional evidence for derivational paradigms. In Sven Kotowski & Ingo Plag (eds.), The semantics of derivational morphology: Theory, methods, evidence, 219–258. Berlin: De Gruyter.10.1515/9783111074917-008Search in Google Scholar

Bonami, Olivier & Denis Paperno. 2018. Inflection vs. derivation in a distributional vector space. Lingue e Linguaggio 17. 173–195.Search in Google Scholar

Bonami, Olivier & Jana Strnadová. 2019. Paradigm structure and predictability in derivational morphology. Morphology 29. 167–197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-018-9322-6.Search in Google Scholar

Booij, Geert. 1996. Inherent versus contextual inflection and the split morphology hypothesis. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1995, 1–16. Dordrecht: Kluwer.10.1007/978-94-017-3716-6_1Search in Google Scholar

Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Booij, Geert & Francesca Masini. 2015. The role of second order schemas in the construction of complex words. In Laurie Bauer, Lívia Körtvélyessy & Pavol Štekauer (eds.), Semantics of complex words, 47–66. Dordrecht: Springer.10.1007/978-3-319-14102-2_4Search in Google Scholar

Bowdle, Brian F. & Dedre Gentner. 2005. The career of metaphor. Psychological Review 112. 193–216. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.112.1.193.Search in Google Scholar

Boyé, Gilles & Gauvain Schalchli. 2016. The status of paradigms. In Andrew Hippisley & Gregory Stump (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology, 206–234. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781139814720.009Search in Google Scholar

Bruening, Benjamin. 2018. The lexicalist hypothesis: Both wrong and superfluous. Language 94. 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2018.0000.Search in Google Scholar

Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511612886Search in Google Scholar

Chowdhery, Aakanksha, et al.. 2022. Palm: Scaling language modeling with pathways. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02311.Search in Google Scholar

Devlin, Jacob, Ming-Wei Chang Kenton Lee & Kristina Toutanova. 2019. BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019, 4171–4186. Minneapolis, MN: Association for Computational Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar

Di Sciullo, Anna Maria & Edwin Williams. 1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1989. Prototypical differences between inflection and derivation. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 42. 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-1989-0102.Search in Google Scholar

Erk, Katrin. 2022. The probabilistic turn in semantics and pragmatics. Annual Review of Linguistics 8. 101–121. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-015515.Search in Google Scholar

Erk, Katrin & Aurélie Herbelot. 2024. How to marry a star: Probabilistic constraints for meaning in context. Journal of Semantics. 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffad016.Search in Google Scholar

Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. Frame semanrics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm 3. Selected papers from SICOL-1981, 111–137. Seoul: Hanshin.Search in Google Scholar

Fillmore, Charles J., Paul Kay & Mary Catherine O’Connor. 1988. Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone. Language 64. 501–538. https://doi.org/10.2307/414531.Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, Adèle. 2019. Explain me this. Creativity, competition, and the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.2307/j.ctvc772nnSearch in Google Scholar

Halle, Morris & Alex Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Haspelmath, Martin. 2024. Inflection and derivation as traditional comparative concepts. Linguistics 62. 43–77. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2022-0086.Search in Google Scholar

Hathout, Nabil & Fiammetta Namer. 2022. ParaDis: A family and paradigm model. Morphology 32. 153–195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09390-w.Search in Google Scholar

Hay, Jennifer B. & R. Harald Baayen. 2005. Shifting paradigms: Gradient structure in morphology. TRENDS in Cognitive Science 9. 342–348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.04.002.Search in Google Scholar

Hockett, Charles F. 1954. Two models of grammatical description. Word 10. 210–234. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1954.11659524.Search in Google Scholar

Horn, Laurence R. 1984. Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In Deborah Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications, 11–42. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Jackendoff, Ray. 1975. Morphological and semantic regularities in the lexicon. Language 51. 639–671. https://doi.org/10.2307/412891.Search in Google Scholar

Jackendoff, Ray. 1998. The architecture of the language faculty: A neominimalist perspective. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds.), The limits of syntax, 19–46. New York, NY: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004373167_003Search in Google Scholar

Jackendoff, Ray & Jenny Audring. 2020. The texture of the lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780198827900.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Kruszewski, Mikołai. 1883. Outline of linguistic science. Reprinted in Mikołai Kruszewki (1995). In Writings in general linguisitcs, 37–174. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/acil.11Search in Google Scholar

Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Revised 2003. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.10.7208/chicago/9780226470993.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Langacker, Ronald W. 2019. Morphology in cognitive grammar. In Jenny Audring & Francesca Masini (eds.), The Oxford handbook of morphological theory, 346–365. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668984.013.19Search in Google Scholar

Lapata, Maria & Alex Lascarides. 2003. A probabilistic account of logical metonymy. Computational Linguistics 29. 261–315. https://doi.org/10.1162/089120103322145324.Search in Google Scholar

Lieber, Rochelle. 2004. Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Lieber, Rochelle. 2016. English nouns. The ecology of nominalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781316676288Search in Google Scholar

Liu, Qianchu, Diana McCarthy & Anna Korhonen. 2020. Towards better context-aware lexical semantics: Adjusting contextualized representations through static anchors. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 4066–4075.10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.333Search in Google Scholar

Loureiro, Daniel, Kiamehr Rezaee, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar & Jose, Camacho-Collados. 2021. Analysis and evaluation of language models for word sense disambiguation. Computational Linguistics 47. 387–443.10.1162/coli_a_00405Search in Google Scholar

van Marle, Jaap. 1984. On the paradigmatic dimension of morphological creativity. Dordrecht: Foris.10.1515/9783111558387Search in Google Scholar

Matthews, Peter H. 1972. Inflectional morphology. A theoretical study based on aspects of Latin verb conjugation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

McRae, Ken & Kazunaga Matsuki. 2009. People use their knowledge of common events to understand language, and do so as quickly as possible. Language and Linguistics Compass 3. 1417–1429. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818x.2009.00174.x.Search in Google Scholar

Mikolov, Tomas, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado & Jeffrey, Dean. 2013. Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781.Search in Google Scholar

OpenAI, et al.. 2024. GPT-4 technical report. arXiv: 2303.08774 [cs.CL].Search in Google Scholar

Perlmutter, David M. 1988. The split morphology hypothesis: Evidence from Yiddish. In Michael Hammond & Michael Noonan (eds.), Theoretical morphology: Approaches in modern linguistics, 79–100. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.10.1163/9789004454101_008Search in Google Scholar

Pounder, Amanda. 2000. Process and paradigms in word-formation morphology. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110814378Search in Google Scholar

Robins, Robert H. 1959. In defense of WP. Transactions of the Philological Society 58. 116–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968x.1959.tb00301.x.Search in Google Scholar

Salvadori, Justine & Richard Huyghe. 2023. Affix polyfunctionality in French deverbal nominalizations. Morphology 33. 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-022-09401-4.Search in Google Scholar

Sanford, Anthony J. & Simon C. Garrod. 1998. The role of scenario mapping in text comprehension. Discourse Processes 26. 159–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539809545043.Search in Google Scholar

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.Search in Google Scholar

Sennrich, Rico, Barry Haddow & Alexandra Birch. 2015. Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units. arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.07909.10.18653/v1/P16-1162Search in Google Scholar

Soler, Aina Garí, Matthieu Labeau & Chloé Clavel. 2024. The impact of word splitting on the semantic content of contextualized word representations. arXiv: 2402.14616 [cs.CL].10.1162/tacl_a_00647Search in Google Scholar

Spencer, Andrew. 2013. Lexical relatedness: A paradigm-based model. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199679928.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Štekauer, Pavol. 2005. Meaning predictability in word formation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/sfsl.54Search in Google Scholar

Štekauer, Pavol. 2014. Derivational paradigms. In Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Štekauer (eds.), The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology, 354–369. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Yeh, Wenchi & Lawrence W. Barsalou. 2006. The situated nature of concepts. The American Journal of Psychology 119. 349–384. https://doi.org/10.2307/20445349.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2024-07-04
Published in Print: 2024-06-25

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 6.12.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/tl-2024-2006/html
Scroll to top button